A concise description of Biblical and Epigraphic Hebrew, incorporating some of the latest discoveries about its phonology, syntax, and communicative role.

This chapter lays out how the Priestly corpus represents a distinctive form of material religion within the ancient Near East. Both its ideology and practice, on the one hand, and its physical shape as a composition, on the other, are distinctive and have had distinctive impacts on the history of religion. While the acts that the Priestly corpus…[Read more]

What do we call the drive to juxtapose multiple variants of an event or omen within a single passage or text such as we find in major first-millennium works like Enūma Anu Enlil and Sa.gig? This article proposes a term from musicology, “heterophony” which describes the practice of presenting multiple variants of a melody simultaneously in a…[Read more]

Maybe there aren’t any!

This paper examines a foundational tradition of Second Temple scholarship: that the figure of Enoch was inspired by the mythical Babylonian diviner-king Enmeduranki because both revealers were the seventh of ten figures before the flood. It finds that no preserved pre-Chris- tian texts present Enmeduranki this way, and no evidence that anybody in…[Read more]

For almost 200 years scholars have recognized that most of the Pentateuch can be clearly divided into two separate, but interwoven literary works.. These are the Priestly and non-Priestly traditions, with the Priestly forming a clear and continuous whole and the Non-Priestly the main area of debate. Despite this, there has been no way to simply…[Read more]

In this review I discuss Michael Wise’s 2015 Language and Literacy in Roman Judaea: A Study of the Bar Kokhba Documents

in L. Lawrence and M. Aguilar eds., Anthropology and Biblical Studies: Avenues of Approach. Leiden: Deo, 2004: 120-139.

UC Davis Hebrew Bible PhD Reading List (Dec 2019 draft)

When a people in Zimbabwe have more of the “Jewish Priestly gene” than many Jewish Priests, what does genetics tell us? Perhaps that there is more than one historical pathway to authenticity.