Steven Weitzman
Stanford University
Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Ph.D., Harvard
sweitzma@stanford.edu
Steven Weitzman specializes in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the histories of Flavius Josephus. Drawing heavily on comparative evidence from ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Roman culture, he has sought to rethink the relationship between texts and contexts in the Hebrew Bible/early Judaism and to pose new questions about ritual, religious violence, early Jewish literary practice, and the history of biblical interpretation. Weitzman's publications include Song and Story in Biblical Narrative (Indiana University Press, 1997), winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in the Humanities; Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2005); Religion and the Self in Antiquity (edited with David Brakke and Michael Satlow from Indiana University Press, 2005); and The Jews: a History (with John Efron, Matthias Lehmann and Joshua Holo; Prentice Hall, 2009) His current projects include a biography of King Solomon under contract with Yale University Press. He has a passing interest in archaeology, having collaborated on the Tel-Beth Shemesh excavation for several years, but his main passion as a scholar/teacher is two dimensional--reading and how it helps to generate culture.