David Lambert
Harvard University, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Ph.D. (2004, supervised by James L. Kugel).
My work is in the Hebrew Bible and its history of interpretation. My goal is to further elucidate the Bible by making readers aware of the interpretive tendencies that they bring to bear on the biblical text. In that vein, I look to bring historical critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible into closer conversation with the history of biblical interpretation.
This theme comes to the fore in my book, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2016 AAR Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Textual Studies. It considers how the primacy accorded repentance within Hellenistic Judaism leads to the development of a series of interpretive practices whereby Jewish and Christian communities read repentance back into Scripture. It asks what it might mean to read the Bible without this penitential lens and, through a close reading of a series of biblical and extrabiblical passages, offers alternative descriptions of a variety of ancient Israelite practices and phenomena: fasting, appeal, confession, the phrase, “return to YHWH,” and prophecy, as well as redemptive expectations among sectarians in the Second Temple period.
I am now focusing on a series of studies that aim to assess more broadly how modern Western notions of the subject have shaped biblical interpretation and, especially, translation practices. In 2017-2018, I was on leave pursuing these questions as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem as part of a research group working on “The Subject of Antiquity: Contours and Expressions of the Self in Ancient Mediterranean Culture.” Articles on the topic include: “The Book of Job in Ritual Perspective,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134:3 (2015); “Refreshing Philology: James Barr, Supersessionism, and the State of Biblical Words,” Biblical Interpretation 24:3 (2016); and “‘Desire’ Enacted in the Wilderness: Problems in the History of the Self and Bible Translation” in Self, Self-Fashioning and Individuality in Late Antiquity (forthcoming).
In my teaching, I also aim to integrate historical critical approaches with attention to the history of interpretation in such courses as “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Literature” and “The Bible and its Translation." My main pedagogical goal is to train students to become critical readers of texts by gaining awareness of their own interpretive presuppositions.
Finally, my course, “What is Scripture? Formations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Canon?” represents for me another research interest, namely, in the formation of the Hebrew Bible as Scripture. What is Scripture, and how did we arrive at the concept? Is Scripture a uniform idea and was there, therefore, a singular canonical process, or is the very idea of Scripture itself contested and multiform? This project will be appearing as a monograph, “What is Scripture? Redescribing the Bible, its Formation and Interpretation” with Yale University Press. An initial article on the topic has been published: “How the ‘Torah of Moses’ Became Revelation: An Early, Apocalyptic Theory of Pentateuchal Origins,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 47:1 (2016).
My work is in the Hebrew Bible and its history of interpretation. My goal is to further elucidate the Bible by making readers aware of the interpretive tendencies that they bring to bear on the biblical text. In that vein, I look to bring historical critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible into closer conversation with the history of biblical interpretation.
This theme comes to the fore in my book, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2016 AAR Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Textual Studies. It considers how the primacy accorded repentance within Hellenistic Judaism leads to the development of a series of interpretive practices whereby Jewish and Christian communities read repentance back into Scripture. It asks what it might mean to read the Bible without this penitential lens and, through a close reading of a series of biblical and extrabiblical passages, offers alternative descriptions of a variety of ancient Israelite practices and phenomena: fasting, appeal, confession, the phrase, “return to YHWH,” and prophecy, as well as redemptive expectations among sectarians in the Second Temple period.
I am now focusing on a series of studies that aim to assess more broadly how modern Western notions of the subject have shaped biblical interpretation and, especially, translation practices. In 2017-2018, I was on leave pursuing these questions as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem as part of a research group working on “The Subject of Antiquity: Contours and Expressions of the Self in Ancient Mediterranean Culture.” Articles on the topic include: “The Book of Job in Ritual Perspective,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134:3 (2015); “Refreshing Philology: James Barr, Supersessionism, and the State of Biblical Words,” Biblical Interpretation 24:3 (2016); and “‘Desire’ Enacted in the Wilderness: Problems in the History of the Self and Bible Translation” in Self, Self-Fashioning and Individuality in Late Antiquity (forthcoming).
In my teaching, I also aim to integrate historical critical approaches with attention to the history of interpretation in such courses as “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Literature” and “The Bible and its Translation." My main pedagogical goal is to train students to become critical readers of texts by gaining awareness of their own interpretive presuppositions.
Finally, my course, “What is Scripture? Formations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Canon?” represents for me another research interest, namely, in the formation of the Hebrew Bible as Scripture. What is Scripture, and how did we arrive at the concept? Is Scripture a uniform idea and was there, therefore, a singular canonical process, or is the very idea of Scripture itself contested and multiform? This project will be appearing as a monograph, “What is Scripture? Redescribing the Bible, its Formation and Interpretation” with Yale University Press. An initial article on the topic has been published: “How the ‘Torah of Moses’ Became Revelation: An Early, Apocalyptic Theory of Pentateuchal Origins,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 47:1 (2016).
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as a series of effects through social relations, material commitments, events, and objects that extend beyond the self and exist between selves. I explore this theme through several focal points in the Joseph narratives – Joseph‘s dream, the brothers‘ "guilt,“ Joseph‘s weeping, and Judah‘s petition – with special attention to issues of emotion and translation as they pertain to Hebrew terms for “love” (ʾhb), “hate” (śnʾ ), “jealousy” (qn’), “memory” (zkr), “guilt” (‘sm̆ ), and “sight” (rʾh).
The second part of the article considers the ways in which Barr’s thoroughgoing critique of its specious appropriation for theology has left many justifiably skittish about employing it to any significant effect and has contributed, perhaps, to the sense that ongoing engagement with the original languages of biblical literature is not a necessity and, certainly, not an avenue to creative scholarship. Examples will be adduced from biblical Hebrew ydʿ (“know”), lev (“heart”), and ʾhb (“love”) for how we might approach language and its deployment as a way of engaging difference in and through, among other topics, ancient Israelite thinking about “mind” and “emotions.”
The article concludes with the suggestion that we might move the practice of philology forward in biblical studies by attending more fully to the positionality of its practitioners. In particular, what emerges throughout the study is the dominance of a certain interiorizing language of the self, whereby biblical Hebrew terms are made to conform to a modern dichotomy of mind and body.
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as a series of effects through social relations, material commitments, events, and objects that extend beyond the self and exist between selves. I explore this theme through several focal points in the Joseph narratives – Joseph‘s dream, the brothers‘ "guilt,“ Joseph‘s weeping, and Judah‘s petition – with special attention to issues of emotion and translation as they pertain to Hebrew terms for “love” (ʾhb), “hate” (śnʾ ), “jealousy” (qn’), “memory” (zkr), “guilt” (‘sm̆ ), and “sight” (rʾh).
The second part of the article considers the ways in which Barr’s thoroughgoing critique of its specious appropriation for theology has left many justifiably skittish about employing it to any significant effect and has contributed, perhaps, to the sense that ongoing engagement with the original languages of biblical literature is not a necessity and, certainly, not an avenue to creative scholarship. Examples will be adduced from biblical Hebrew ydʿ (“know”), lev (“heart”), and ʾhb (“love”) for how we might approach language and its deployment as a way of engaging difference in and through, among other topics, ancient Israelite thinking about “mind” and “emotions.”
The article concludes with the suggestion that we might move the practice of philology forward in biblical studies by attending more fully to the positionality of its practitioners. In particular, what emerges throughout the study is the dominance of a certain interiorizing language of the self, whereby biblical Hebrew terms are made to conform to a modern dichotomy of mind and body.