Professor William Schniedewind will visit The Ohio State University to present a talk on his forthcoming book, Synagogues, Scrolls, and the Divine Voice.
Before the word of God was a book, it was a voice. In ancient Israel, the word of God was first experienced as divine speech—spoken through prophets, heard in communal gatherings, and remembered in oral tradition. This lecture traces the transformation: how divine speech became a sacred text and how scrolls became the embodiment of the divine voice in the synagogue.
William Schniedewind is Professor of Biblical Studies and Northwest Semitic Languages, as well as Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director at the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. He was the inaugural holder of the Kershaw Term Chair in Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies, and he served as the NELC Department Chair for many years. His books and articles cover a wide range of topics relating to biblical studies, Dead Sea Scrolls, and ancient languages and inscriptions. His research and teaching combines the study of literature, language, and archaeology. At UCLA, he teaches undergraduate classes on “Introduction to Biblical Literature,” “Jerusalem, the Holy City,” “Ancient Israelite Religion,” and “Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Judaism.” His graduate seminars cover the various biblical literature and Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient inscriptions, History of the Hebrew Language, and the Ugaritic language. He has supervised over thirty dissertations for a diverse cohort of students now teaching at colleges and universities throughout the world.