Hanne Loeland Levinson

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures at the University of Minnesota, a position I have held since August 2013. I am also a member of the Center for Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, and affiliated faculty at the department for Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Previously, I was Associate Professor of Old Testament Studies at the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society  in Oslo (Norway) from 2007–2013, where I also received my doctoral degree.

Within the academic study of the Hebrew Bible, I specialize in gender studies, metaphor theory, death studies, and biblical narratives.

My first book, Silent or Salient Gender? The Interpretation of Gendered God-Language in the Hebrew Bible, Exemplified in Isaiah 42, 46 and 49 (Mohr Siebeck, 2008), received the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise in 2008.

My newest book The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible: Rhetorical Strategies for Survival (Cambridge University Press, 2021). This is the first monograph to systematically investigate the texts in the Hebrew Bible in which a character expresses a wish to die. Contrary to previous scholarship on these texts that assumed these death wishes were simply a desire to escape suffering, I employ narrative criticism and conversation analysis, together with diachronic methods, to carefully hear each death-wish text in its literary context. I demonstrate that death wishes embody powerful, multi-faceted rhetorical strategies. Grouping the death-wish texts into four main rhetorical strategies of negotiation, expression of despair and anger, longing to undo one’s existence, and wishing for a different reality, I portray the complex reasons why characters in the Hebrew Bible wish for death. I conclude that the death wishes navigate the tension between longing for death and fighting for survival —a tension that many live with also today as they attempt to claim agency and autonomy in life.

In 2012/13 I spent a year in Jerusalem as a visiting scholar in the Bible Department at Hebrew University and at the Swedish Theological Institute. I have also been a visiting scholar at Stellenbosch University (South Africa), Duke University, and Luther Theological Seminary in St Paul. As a student, I spent time at the University of Göttingen (Germany), Hebrew University (Jerusalem), and the University of Chicago.
Phone: 612-624-8341
Address: University of Minnesota
245 Nicholson
216 Pillsbury Dr. SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0229