Simeon Chavel
Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible
Ph.D., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Most of the time, Professor Chavel ("Simi") is drawn to the religious imagination of ancient Israel, keen to revivify its ideas, modes of expression, and history. Often, he finds himself pulled to literary questions of genre, rhetoric and poetics in the Hebrew Bible. Sometimes, he ventures off into the relationship between history and forms of historiography. In all cases, he tends to keep one eye trained broadly on ancient Near Eastern culture and another trained more acutely on composition history (a.k.a. "source criticism"), manuscript history ("textual criticism") and interpretation (especially rabbinic). One example of his interdisciplinary style is his article, "The Second Passover, Pilgrimage, and the Centralized Cult," published in the Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009) (login required). Currently, he is completing his first book, Oracular Law and Narrative History: The Priestly Literature of the Pentateuch (to be published by Mohr Siebeck), on a type of short story about law and legislation - the "oracular novella" - and its significance for the Priestly literature in particular and biblical historiography in general.
