Research Profile
My research addresses the literary, cultural, and religious history of the Hebrew Bible, from its earliest Iron Age materials (ca. 1150–550 BCE) to the later traditions that stem from the Persian and Hellenistic eras (ca. 550–31 BCE). The highly composite nature of the Hebrew Bible makes it one of the most fascinating, and also most complex, artifacts of antiquity. My work focuses on ritual texts — their literary formation and their value for reconstructing key developments within Israelite religion. These materials, predominantly clustered in books like Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Ezekiel, were once disparaged by scholars as legalistic and the beginning of the end for the “true” spirit of Israelite religion. In recent years, however, they have reemerged at the center of a complex discussion concerning the literary history of the Hebrew Bible and its key notions of deity, cult, and collective identity. Meanwhile, older cultic texts in the Psalms and Former and Latter Prophets have become the subject of fascinating debates concerning the origins of the Israelite divinity and the similarities and differences between Israelite religion and the religions of the wider Near East.
Within this field, my research has centered, first, on the literary processes by which the biblical texts developed over time to advance new discursive interests and to promote new socio-cultic norms. I expose the narrative, structural, and linguistic schisms within the texts to reveal their earliest layers and later revisions. This work is often granular, but its results can be far-reaching. It has allowed me to reconstruct, for instance, how the biblical laws were reimagined as divine speeches, thereby invested with ultimate authority and normative force; how the story of Israel’s origins was retold to promote a single family of priests as the exclusive mediators of the Yahwistic cult; and how the ark of the covenant was transformed from a dynamic war palladium to a static piece of temple furniture.
Second, I interrogate the complex relationship between biblical texts and historical events, especially changes in the cult and ritual practice, as can be reconstructed from archaeological, epigraphic, and comparative evidence. While the Hebrew Bible remains an essential source for the cultural and religious history of ancient Israel, its imaginative character and the tendency of its authors to actively obscure their individual identities pose major interpretative challenges. My research seeks to uncover the contexts in which the biblical texts likely emerged and explore their connections to historical realities. My work is distinctive for its longue durée approach, through which I treat not only the origins of the biblical texts but also their transmission and earliest reception in the Second Temple era (ca. 515 BCE–70 CE). Such a widening of focus ventures beyond traditional boundaries within my discipline, and it allows me to offer new insights on problems of central importance to Israelite and early Jewish religion: how Jerusalem emerged as the center of the sacrificial cult in Judah, how the pig prohibition became an identity marker for ancient Jews, and how a concern for war commemoration transformed the biblical calendar.
Read more about my research projects here:
Ritual Text and Ritual Practice
Authorship and the Hebrew Bible
Hermeneia Commentary on Leviticus
A full list of my publications is available in my CV.