About

Mark K. George is Professor of Bible and Ancient Systems of Thought at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. His scholarship primarily treats the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and, within that corpus, the Pentateuch and narrative texts. The focus of his work is on ancient systems of thought operating within this literature, whether they be social systems and structures expressed through the practices and conceptions of space, or the creation of particular subjectivities and the ways in which individuals govern or conduct their lives.

George is the author or editor of three books, including Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space (SBL Press, 2009) and a number of articles and encyclopedia entries, including “Aniconism” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts (Oxford, 2016). His current project is a book titled Deuteronomy’s Subject: Governmentality and the Creation of “Israel,” an analysis of the systems and techniques by which Deuteronomy creates Israel as a governable subject, one that is loyal and docile. He also is learning natural language processing (NLP), which is opening up new avenues of research as well as new perspectives from which to examine ancient systems of thought.

Education

Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary, Biblical Studies (Old Testament).

M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary, Biblical Studies (Old Testament).

B.A., University of Washington, Economic and English Literature (Double major).

Blog Posts

    Publications

    Books

    Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space. Society of Biblical Literature Ancient Israel and Its Literature 2. Edited by Benjamin D. Sommer. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2009.

    Religious Representation in Place: Exploring Meaningful Spaces at the Intersection of the Humanities and Sciences. Edited by Mark K. George and Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati. Religion and Spatial Studies 1. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

    Constructions of Space IV: Further Developments in Examining Ancient Israel’s Social Space. Edited by Mark K. George. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 569. Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013.

    Articles

    “Watch Your Step! Excrement and Governmentality in Deuteronomy,” Biblical Interpretation, in press.

    “The Sabbath, Regimes of Truth, and the Subjectivity of Ancient Israel,” Journal of Religion & Society, Supplement Series 13 (2016): 5–21. Available as an open access article at: https://dspace.creighton.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10504/74597/2016-6.pdf?sequence=1.

    “Analyzing Embodied Space in Ancient Israel’s Tabernacle,” in Religious Representation in Place: Exploring Meaningful Spaces at the Intersection of the Humanities and Sciences (ed. by Mark K. George and Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati; Religion and Spatial Studies 1; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 63­–74.

    “Socio-Spatial Logic and the Structure of the Book of Numbers,” in Constructions of Space IV: Further Developments in Examining Ancient Israel’s Social Space (Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 569; New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 23–43.

    “Israelite Aniconism and the Visualization of the Tabernacle,” Journal of Religion & Society Supplement Series 8 (2012): 40–54. https://dspace2.creighton.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10504/64671/2012-4.pdf?sequence=1.

    “Masculinity and Its Regimentation in Deuteronomy,” in Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond (The Bible in the Modern World 33; ed. by Ovidiu Creanga; Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 64–83.

    “Postmodern Literary Criticism: The Impossibility of Method,” in Method Matters: Essays on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David L. Petersen (ed. by Joel LeMon and Kent Richards; SBL Press, 2009), 459–77.

    “Space and History: Siting Critical Space for Biblical Studies,” in Constructions of Space I: Theory, Geography, and Narrative (ed. by Jon Berquist and Claudia Camp; The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 481; New York: T & T Clark, 2007), 19–38.

    “Yhwh’s Own Heart,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 64/3 (July, 2002), 442–59.

    “Shoah Consciousness and the Silence of American Christian Biblical Scholarship,” in A Shadow of Glory: Reading the New Testament After the Holocaust, ed. by T. Linafelt (New York: Routledge, 2002), 42–54.

    “Fluid Stability in First Samuel 17,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 64/1 (January, 2002), 17–36.

    “Tabernacle and Temple Spaces,” 2000 SBL Seminar Paper, Constructions of Ancient Space section, SBL Annual Meeting, Nashville, TN (paper available on Constructions of Ancient Space Seminar website at Case Western Reserve University: http://www.cwru.edu/affil/GAIR/Constructions/xtrapapers2000.html?nw_view=1447097062.

    “Death as the Beginning of Life in the Book of Ecclesiastes,” in Strange Fire: Reading the Bible After the Holocaust, ed. by Tod Linafelt (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 280–93.

    “Foucault,” in A Handbook for Postmodern Biblical Interpretation, ed. by A. K M. Adam (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000), 91–98.

    “Constructing Identity in 1 Samuel 17,” Biblical Interpretation VII/4 (October 1999), pp. 389–412.

    “Assuming the Body of the Heir Apparent: David’s Lament,” in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies, ed. by Timothy K. Beal and David M. Gunn (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 163–73.

    “Mark 10:1–12; Text of Divorce or Text of Interpretations?” Koinonia IV.1 (Spring 1992), 4–22.

    Encyclopedia entries and commentary entries

    “Aniconism,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts (2 vols.; ed. by Timothy Beal, David M. Gunn, S. Brent Plate, and Yvonne Sherwood; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1:35–45.

    “Ark of the Covenant. I. Hebrew Bible/Old Testament,” The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. A (ed. by Hans-Josef Klauck, Bernard McGinn, Choon-Leong Seow, Hermann Spieckermann, Barry Dov Walfish, and Eric J. Ziolkowski; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 2:744–54.

    “Building an Inclusive Social Space: Parashat Terumah (Exod 25:1–27:19),” in Torah Queeries: Reading the Bible Through a Bent Lens (ed. by Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser, and David Shneer; New York: NYU Press, 2009), Ch. 19 (pp. 102–05).

    Introductions

    “Introduction,” co-authored with Daria Pezoli-Olgiati, in Religious Representation in Place: Exploring Meaningful Spaces at the Intersection of the Humanities and Sciences (ed. by Mark K. George and Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati; Religion and Spatial Studies 1; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–12.

    “Introduction,” Constructions of Space IV: Further Developments in Examining Ancient Israel’s Social Space (Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 569; New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), xi–xvi.

    “Jonathan Z. Smith’s To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual After Twenty Years,” JAAR 76 (2008): 781–82 (also available online at http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/lfn046?ijkey=BfCpZxXPld1PMHJ&keytype=ref).

    Book reviews

    The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel: Theologies of Territory in the Hebrew Bible, by David Frankel (Shiphrut 4, Literature and Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011), Near Eastern Archaeology 76 no. 4 (2013): 254–56.

    Jonathan Loved David: Manly Hermeneutics in the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Sex, by Anthony Heacock (Bible and the Modern World 22; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture 43/3 (2013): 175–76.

    Keeping Heaven on Earth, by Michael B. Hundley (Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2, vol. 50; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 12 (2012), http://www.jhsonline.org/reviews/reviews_new/review607.htm.

    Secularism and Biblical Studies, ed. by Roland Boer, The Bible and Critical Theory 8/1 (2012): 103–05 (http://novaojs.newcastle.edu.au/ojsbct/index.php/bct/issue/view/28).

    The Ontology of Space in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: The Determinate Function of Narrative “Space” within the Biblical Hebrew Aesthetic, by Luke Gärtner-Brereton, Biblical Interpretation 18.4-5 (2010): 455–56.

    Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past, by Mieke Bal, Theology Today 66.3 (October 2009): 368–70.

    Three Faces of Saul: An Intertextual Approach to Biblical Tragedy, by Sarah Nicholson, in Shofar 23/2 (2003).

    Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy, ed. by Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, JAAR 67/4 (Winter 1999): 914–16.

    Old Testament Exegesis: A Guide to the Methodology, by Odil Hannes Steck, in Princeton Seminary Bulletin, NS XVIII/3 (November 1997): 324–25.

    I Am My Body: A Theology of Embodiment, by Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, in Theology Today, 53/4 (January, 1997): 563.

    Memberships

    American Academy of Religion

    Society of Biblical Literature

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