The focus of my research and teaching is the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish culture and literature before 100 C.E., the latter encompassing Jewish Greek texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writing. In recent work I have been especially interested in the role of violence in early Jewish culture. Recent publications in this area include Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2005), a study of how early Jews sustained the Jerusalem Temple and other religious traditions in a world dominated by foreign rulers, along with related essays in the Journal of Religion, the Harvard Theological Review, the Journal of Biblical Literature, and the Journal of Jewish Studies. Shifting my focus from how ancient Jews survived violence to why they perpetrated it themselves, I am currently working on a book that will try to deepen our understanding of the relationship between violence and religion in the formation of Jewish culture.
I have also have a long-standing interest in the so-called literary approach to the Bible, an interest reflected in my first book Song and Story in Biblical Narrative (Indiana University Press, 1997) and in more recent studies of Deuteronomy and the Samson narrative. I am currently editing a special volume of the journal Prooftexts that seeks to revisit/rethink this way of reading the Bible some twenty years after its heyday in the 1980s.
In addition to my role as director of the Borns Jewish Studies program, I serve as division chair for biblical studies in the AJS, as a member of the Prooftexts editorial board, and as director of the IU-Tel Beth Shemesh archaeological program, an IU overseas studies program through which students help to excavate an important Iron Age "border town" situated between ancient Israel and the land of the Philistines.
Education
- Ph.D. at Harvard University, 1993
Background
- Gustave O. Arlt Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in the Humanities, awarded by the Council of Graduate Schools.
- American Council of Learn Societies Fellow (1996-7).
- Yad Hanadiv/Barecha Fellow (1996-7).
- Fulbright Fellow (1991-2).
- Jacob K. Javitz Fellow (1987-91).
Research Interests
- Biblical and Early Jewish Literature and Religion
Courses Recently Taught
- The Bible & Its Interpreters
- Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible
- Judaism in the Making
- King David in Myth and History
- The History of God
Publication Highlights
Books
Song and Story in Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1997).
Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
The Religion and Self in Antiquity, with David Brakke and Michael Satlow (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2005)
The Jews: A History, with John Efron, Matthias Lehmann, and Joshua Holo (Prentice Hall, 2008)
Articles and Chapters
"Josephus on How to Survive Martyrdom" (forthcoming, Journal of Jewish Studies (2004)
"Plotting Antiochus' Persecution," Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004): 219-34.
"Myth, History and Mystery in the Copper Scroll ," The Idea of Biblical Interpretation (edited by J.Newman, H. Najman and J. Kutsko; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 239-255.
"The Samson Story as Border Fiction," Biblical Interpretation 10 (2002): 158-74.
"From Feasts into Mourning: The Violence of Early Jewish Festivals," Journal of Religion 79 (1999): 545-65.
"Forced Circumcision and the Shifting Role of Gentiles in Hasmonean Ideology," Harvard Theological Review 92 (1999): 37-59.
"Reopening the Case of the Suspiciously Suspended Nun in Judges 18:30" Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61 (1999): 448-60.
"Why Did the Qumran Community Write in Hebrew?", Journal of the American Oriental Society 119 (1998): 35-45.
"The Orientalization of Prosimetrium: Prosimetrium in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Literature." In Prosimetrium: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (eds. J. Harris and K. Reichl; Great Britain: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), pp. 225-247.
"Revisiting Myth and Ritual in Early Judaism," Dead Sea Discoveries 4 (1997): 21-54.
"Allusion, Artifice and Exile in the Hymn of Tobit," Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996): 49-61.
"The Shifting Syntax of the Numeral in Biblical Hebrew: a Reassessment," Journal of Near Eastern Studies (1996): 177-185.
"David's Lament and the Poetics of Grief in 2 Samuel," Jewish Quarterly Review 85 (1995): 343-60.
"Lessons from the Dying: the Role of Deuteronomy 32 in its Narrative Setting," Harvard Theological Review 87:4 (1994): 377-393.
"The Song of Abraham," Hebrew Union College Annual 65 (1994): 21-33.
