The Torah scholar wore bluejeans.

That might seem a fairly trivial thing to say about Shalhevet Schwartz, the 14-year-old girl from the Bronx who, in between softball games and the demanding homework at her Jewish high school, studied hard enough to win her division of the National Bible Contest, held last Sunday at Yeshiva University in New York.

But most of the 115 students at this Bible bee, which sends its winners to compete at the international finals in Jerusalem next year, attend Orthodox schools, and thus the fashion code here mirrored the dress codes at those schools, and in most of the children’s families: long skirts for girls, skullcaps and the fringes known as zizit for the boys. From what I could tell, Shalhevet, a freshman at SAR High School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, was one of only two girls to compete in pants.

At SAR, a “modern Orthodox” school, Shalhevet is required to wear a skirt to school every day. But she did not see the need to be in dress code on this given Sunday, when her only commitment was to vanquish her competition answering multiple-choice questions on obscure biblical passages. And while there was an English-language division, Shalhevet competed in Hebrew.

A sampler of the questions Shalhevet and her fellow competitors faced down: “Which king bought Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver — Omri, Zimri, Ahab or Baasha?” “Who said to whom, ‘If you would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg you, and let me see no more of my wretchedness’ — Moses to God, Joab to Solomon, Naboth to Ahab, or Obadiah to Elijah?” “Who was not David’s son — Adonijah, Solomon, Absalom or Joab?”