Notes on Contributors
Melissa Sayyad Bach
holds a post-doctoral position at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, as part of the AMRAM project (Apocalypticism: Manuscripts, Rewriting, and Authority Management), which investigates the earliest apocalyptic documents found among the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, from the perspective of authority. Currently, as part of the project, she examines the emergence of apocalypticism in visions and dreams, utilizing insights from cognitive sciences. Her research interests and publications include the Old Testament, Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical hermeneutics, and cognitive science of religion.
Kelley Coblentz Bautch
is Professor of Religious and Theological Studies at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas (PhD in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity, the University of Notre Dame). Her publications take up Enochic literature, deuterocanonical books, and texts that are described today as pseudepigraphal and apocalyptic. Her scholarship also explores the history of women in antiquity as well as angelology and demonology in early Judaism and Christianity. Currently she works on a commentary on 1 Maccabees (Liturgical Press).
Mathias Coeckelbergs
is a teaching assistant and PhD student at the Information Science Department of the ULB. He works on a joint doctorate, together with the QLVL research group of KU Leuven, focusing on the application of text mining methods to ancient Hebrew. The end goal of his research is to compare unsupervised machine learning methods for their ability to model the intertextuality of Hebrew texts.
Edward M. Cook
is Ordinary Professor of Semitic Languages at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. Among other works, he is author of the Dictionary of Qumran Aramaic (Eisenbrauns/Penn State University Press, 2015) and Biblical Aramaic and Related Dialects: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Jacob J. T. Doedens
is currently associate professor and head of the Biblical Institute at the Pápa Reformed Theological Seminary, Pápa, Hungary. Between 2007 and 2016, he taught at the Reformed Theological Academy of Sárospatak, Hungary. He is a biblical scholar who specializes in the exegesis of Gen 6:1–4 and its reception history within Second Temple literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, and early Christianity. He has published articles in English, Dutch, and Hungarian on the Old Testament, Second Temple literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament.
Henryk Drawnel
is Professor of Early Judaism, Center for the Study of Second Temple Judaism, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Lublin, Poland. He holds a SSD (Sacrae Scripturae Doctor) in Biblical Exegesis from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome. His research concentrates on Aramaic Qumran manuscripts and Jewish pseudepigraphic and apocalyptic literature from the Second Temple period. His recent publication is Qumran Cave 4: The Aramaic Books of Enoch, 4Q201, 4Q202, 4Q204, 4Q205, 4Q206, 4Q207, 4Q212 (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Shlomi Efrati
received his PhD in 2019 from the department of Talmud and Halakhah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 2014 he is a member of the “Unknown traditions of the Babylonian Talmud preserved in the Cairo Genizah” project at the Hebrew University. In 2019, he joined the Scripta Qumranica Electronica project at the University of Haifa as a postdoctoral research associate. Currently he is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project TEXTEVOLVE for the study of manuscripts of Targum at KU Leuven.
Steven Fassberg
is Caspar Levias Professor of Ancient Semitic Languages in the Department of Hebrew Language at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; PhD, Harvard University, 1984. He is a member of the Academy of Hebrew Language. His teaching and research have focused on Biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Aramaic dialectology, and Northwest Semitic. His most recent book is An Introduction to the Syntax of Biblical Hebrew (Bialik Institute, 2019).
Ida Fröhlich
is Professor emerita, Pázmány Péter Catholic University Budapest. She published a comprehensive Hungarian translation of the Qumran texts (1998, 2000). She has widely published on the Qumran prophetic commentaries (pesharim), historical memory in the Qumran texts, the Aramaic Enochic collection from Qumran, the book of Tobit, and Qumran magical texts.
Matthew Goff
received his PhD in 2002 from the University of Chicago. He is a professor of Hebrew and Second Temple Judaism at Florida State University. His most recent publication is a co-edited volume with Greg Goering and Samuel Adams, Sirach and Its Contexts: The Pursuit of Wisdom and Human Flourishing (Brill, 2021).
Holger Gzella
born in 1974, he is, after fifteen years as Professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at Leiden, Professor of Old Testament at the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europaea and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He studied Classics at Oxford University and subsequently specialized in Semitic languages, earning degrees at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and Heidelberg University. His most recent works include Aramaic: A History of the First World Language (Grand Rapids, 2021) and Aramäisch: Weltsprache des Altertums (Munich, 2023) for C. H. Beck’s Historische Bibliothek der Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung.
Jesper Høgenhaven
is Professor of Old Testament at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen and director of the AMRAM project (Apocalypticism: Manuscripts, Rewriting, and Authority Management). The project investigates the earliest apocalyptic documents found among the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, from the perspective of authority. Currently, as part of the project, he works on a new text edition, with introduction and commentary, of the “Visions of Amram.” His research interests and publications include the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Copper Scroll, ancient Judaism, Old Testament theology, and the formation of the biblical canon.
Kasper Siegismund
holds a post-doctoral position at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen as part of the AMRAM project (Apocalypticism: Manuscripts, Rewriting, and Authority Management). The project investigates the earliest apocalyptic documents found among the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, from the perspective of authority. Currently, as part of the project, he investigates the tension between the notions of divine control and human choice, as expressed in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient Jewish writings. His research interests and publications include the Old Testament, Dead Sea Scrolls, wisdom literature, and Semitic philology.
John Steele
is Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity in the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University. He researches the history of the ancient astral sciences and its circulation and reception, with a particular focus on Babylonian astronomy. He is the author of several books including recently The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019; co-authored with Hermann Hunger) and Rising Time Schemes in Babylonian Astronomy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017).
James VanderKam
is John A. O’Brien Professor of Hebrew Scriptures, University of Notre Dame, Emeritus. His recent publications include the two-volume Jubilees: A Commentary, in the Hermeneia series (2018) and Jubilees: The Hermeneia Translation (2020), both published by Fortress Press. He was the president of the Society of Biblical Literature for the year 2021.