Bernard Levinson

Background

About Bernard Levinson

I hold the Berman Family Chair of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible and am an affiliated professor of law at the University of Minnesota. My research focuses on biblical and cuneiform law, textual reinterpretation in the Second Temple period, and the relation of the Bible to Western intellectual history. The interdisciplinary significance of my work has been recognized with appointments to the Institute for Advanced Study (1997); the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (2007); and the National Humanities Center (2010), where I served as the Henry Luce Senior Fellow in Religious Studies for the 2010–2011 academic year. An important part of my work is to bring academic biblical scholarship to the attention of a broader, non-specialist readership. I have recently written on the impact of the King James Version of the Bible upon the American Founding and drawn attention in the national press to the role of early feminist Bible scholars, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in helping win the vote for women. During the 2012-2013 academic year, I co-directed an international research team on a project titled “Convergence and Divergence in Pentateuchal Theory: Bridging the Academic Cultures of Israel, North America, and Europe,” at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For more information about my research, and for a complete list of my publications, visit my professional website at https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/bernardlevinson. Specialties: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern studies, with a particular focus on biblical and cuneiform law. In addition, Deuteronomy; literary approaches to biblical studies; and the history of interpretation.