David Lambert

Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 2004
M.A., Harvard University, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 2004
A.B., Harvard University, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1998

Research Interests

• Hebrew Bible in its Ancient Near Eastern environment
• Hermeneutics and the history of biblical interpretation
• Late Second Temple Judaism
• History of Jewish thought
• History of the Self
• Translation Studies

Professional Biography

My work is in the Hebrew Bible and its history of interpretation. My goal is to further elucidate the Bible by making readers aware of the interpretive tendencies that they bring to bear on the biblical text. In that vein, I look to bring historical critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible into closer conversation with the history of biblical interpretation.

This theme comes to the fore in my book, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2016 AAR Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Textual Studies. It considers how the primacy accorded repentance within Hellenistic Judaism leads to the development of a series of interpretive practices whereby Jewish and Christian communities read repentance back into Scripture. It asks what it might mean to read the Bible without this penitential lens and, through a close reading of a series of biblical and extrabiblical passages, offers alternative descriptions of a variety of ancient Israelite practices and phenomena: fasting, appeal, confession, the phrase, “return to YHWH,” and prophecy, as well as redemptive expectations among sectarians in the Second Temple period.

I am now focusing on a series of studies that aim to assess more broadly how modern Western notions of the subject have shaped biblical interpretation and, especially, translation practices. In 2017-2018, I was on leave pursuing these questions as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem as part of a research group working on “The Subject of Antiquity: Contours and Expressions of the Self in Ancient Mediterranean Culture.” Articles on the topic include: “The Book of Job in Ritual Perspective,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134:3 (2015); “Refreshing Philology: James Barr, Supersessionism, and the State of Biblical Words,” Biblical Interpretation 24:3 (2016); and “‘Desire’ Enacted in the Wilderness: Problems in the History of the Self and Bible Translation” in Self, Self-Fashioning and Individuality in Late Antiquity (2019).

In my teaching, I also aim to integrate historical critical approaches with attention to the history of interpretation in such courses as “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Literature” (Reli 103) and “The Bible and its Translation” (Reli 603). My main pedagogical goal is to train students to become critical readers of texts by gaining awareness of their own interpretive presuppositions.

Finally, Reli 602, “What is Scripture? Formations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Canon?” represents for me another research interest, namely, in the formation of the Hebrew Bible as Scripture. What is Scripture, and how did we arrive at the concept? Is Scripture a uniform idea and was there, therefore, a singular canonical process, or is the very idea of Scripture itself contested and multiform? This project will be appearing as a monograph, “Is Bible Scripture? Assembling the Biblical in Ancient Judaism and Beyond” with Yale University Press. An initial article on the topic has been published: “How the ‘Torah of Moses’ Became Revelation: An Early, Apocalyptic Theory of Pentateuchal Origins,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 47:1 (2016).

Awards

• Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Faculty Fellow, Spring 2023
• Senior Faculty Research and Scholarly Leave, Fall 2022
• Schwab Academic Excellence Award, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019
• Fellow, Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, 2017-2018.
• EURIAS Fellowship, 2017-2018.
• AAR Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Textual Studies, 2016.
• Peter Thacher Grauer Fellow, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010-2014
• Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Post-doctoral Fellowship, Yale University, 2004-2007
• Harry and Cecile Starr Dissertation Prize, Harvard University, 2004

Courses Recently Taught

Publication Highlights