Meet the Faculty

Steve Weitzman

  • Professor, Department of Religious Studies
  • Irving M. Glazer Chair, Jewish Studies Program
  • Director, Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program

Education

  • Ph.D. at Harvard University, 1993

Contact Information

Sycamore Hall, Rm. 331
(812) 855-1174

Background

  • Gustave O. Arlt Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in the Humanities, awarded by the Council of Graduate Schools.
  • American Council of Learn Societies Fellow (1996-7).
  • Yad Hanadiv/Barecha Fellow (1996-7).
  • Fulbright Fellow (1991-2).
  • Jacob K. Javitz Fellow (1987-91).

Steve Weitzman I am the Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and the director of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program. My research and teaching encompass the Hebrew Bible and the religious and literary creativity it inspired in post-biblical Judaism. My books include Song and Story in Biblical Narrative (1997), and Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity, forthcoming from Harvard University Press in Spring 2005. Other recent publications include "King David's Spin Doctors," Prooftexts 23 (2003); "Myth, History and Mystery in the Copper Scroll," in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation, eds., H. Najman and J. Newman (Brill, 2004); and "Plotting Antiochus' Persecution," Journal of Biblical Literature (2004). My current projects include a study exploring God's opacity as represented in biblical and early Jewish literature; a co-written introduction to the history of Jewish civilization; and a co-edited collection of essays on self-formation in Jewish, Christian, and Pagan Antiquity in which I have an essay entitled "Self-Reform in Deuteronomy." I also serve as the director of the IU Tel-Beth Shemesh program, an overseas studies program that has sent IU students to help excavate an important iron age town on the border between ancient Judah and Philistia.

Research Interests

  • Biblical and Early Jewish Literature and Religion

Courses Recently Taught

  • The Bible & Its Interpreters
  • Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible
  • Judaism in the Making
  • King David in Myth and History
  • The History of God

Publication Highlights

Books

Song and Story in Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1997).

Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity (forthcoming, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

With David Brakke and Michael Satlow, Self-Revelations: Religion and Selfhood in Antiquity (Bloomington: Indiana University, forthcoming)

Articles and Chapters

"Josephus on How to Survive Martyrdom" (forthcoming, Journal of Jewish Studies (2004)

"Plotting Antiochus' Persecution," Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004): 219-34.

"Myth, History and Mystery in the Copper Scroll," The Idea of Biblical Interpretation (edited by J.Newman, H. Najman and J. Kutsko; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 239-255.

"The Samson Story as Border Fiction," Biblical Interpretation 10 (2002): 158-74.

"From Feasts into Mourning: The Violence of Early Jewish Festivals," Journal of Religion 79 (1999): 545-65.

"Forced Circumcision and the Shifting Role of Gentiles in Hasmonean Ideology," Harvard Theological Review 92 (1999): 37-59.

"Reopening the Case of the Suspiciously Suspended Nun in Judges 18:30" Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61 (1999): 448-60.

"Why Did the Qumran Community Write in Hebrew?", Journal of the American Oriental Society 119 (1998): 35-45.

"The Orientalization of Prosimetrium: Prosimetrium in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Literature." In Prosimetrium: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (eds. J. Harris and K. Reichl; Great Britain: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), pp. 225-247.

"Revisiting Myth and Ritual in Early Judaism," Dead Sea Discoveries 4 (1997): 21-54.

"Allusion, Artifice and Exile in the Hymn of Tobit," Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996): 49-61.

"The Shifting Syntax of the Numeral in Biblical Hebrew: a Reassessment," Journal of Near Eastern Studies (1996): 177-185.

"David's Lament and the Poetics of Grief in 2 Samuel," Jewish Quarterly Review 85 (1995): 343-60.

"Lessons from the Dying: the Role of Deuteronomy 32 in its Narrative Setting," Harvard Theological Review 87:4 (1994): 377-393.

"The Song of Abraham," Hebrew Union College Annual 65 (1994): 21-33.