Trinity College, Connecticut

Faculty Member, Religion

Assistant Professor, Bible and Jewish Studies

Thesis Title: Writing, Ritual and Apocalypse

About

My work examines how language helped create new religious and political roles in the ancient Near East and early Judaism. The Hebrew Bible is distinctive among ancient Near Eastern literatures in claiming to at once address and constitute the people to whom it speaks: no other contemporary legal or historical corpora address a “you.” In my new book, The Invention of Hebrew, I argue that this grammatical distinction is also political: Hebrew texts were engineered to recruit their audience to a new kind of political community, letting them answer the call to “Hear O Israel.” Why was it ancient Israel who created this durable artifact, arguably the first national literature, and how is "Israel" itself an artifact of this creativity?

I am also interested in mysticism as linguistic practice and the boundaries between "Jewish" and "Near Eastern" cultures. This year I will be at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World working on my second book, Divine Personae and Journeys to Heaven: Ancient Near Eastern Elements of Early Jewish Mysticism (Brill). I suggest de-mystifying mystical experience by looking at the grammar and poetics of actual "mystical" texts to see what kind of speaker they make possible. Historically, this demystification involves setting the texts' myths in a rich Near Eastern evidentiary context; theoretically it involves seeing supposedly ineffable mystical experience as both textual interpretation and ritual action. In turn, this viewpoint suggests more concrete ways to look at what became "mysticism," and how it emerges and develops: how do changes in written participant roles track with shifts in the conception of the self, the human, the divine?

I have a burgeoning interest in biblical source criticism and the linguistic and hermeneutical questions it raises: what do the relationships scholars have seen between E, J and D tell us about what kind of "authors" they were, and how they wanted to be read?

And I am intensely interested in collaboration, both within Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and outside, reaching into Anthropology, Political Science, and Religion to challenge the intellectual isolation of modern from nonmodern cultures in contemporary social theory. My two edited or coedited volumes, Cuneiform in Canaan and Margins of Writing, are the first fruits of work with others in these areas.

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