Education

• BA, Bethel College
• BS, Bethel College
• MDiv, Harvard University
• ThD, Harvard University

Research Interests

My research interests span the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism. I combine traditional historical, literary, and philological approaches with newer methods from cultural anthropology and cognitive linguistics, as well as intersectional, sensory, and somatic analyses. Most of my research and writing aims to interpret ancient Jewish wisdom literature. I am particularly interested in how ancient Jewish sages inculcated wisdom bodily in their students by educating the senses and thereby constructing a sensorium. My current monograph Wisdom in the Flesh aims precisely to describe such a moment in the cultural history of the senses by taking the book of Proverbs as a case study. In addition, I am currently writing a commentary (with Matthew Goff) on the Wisdom of Ben Sira for the Illuminations Commentary Series.

Teaching

• The Nature and Nurture of the Senses
• Sensing the Sacred: Sensory Perception and Religious Imagination
• Israelite Prophets
• Elementary Biblical Hebrew I and II
• Intermediate Biblical Hebrew I and II
• Second Temple Judaism

Selected Publications

• Wisdom's Root Revealed: Ben Sira and the Election of Israel. JSJSup 139. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
• “Sapiential Synesthesia: The Conceptual Blending of Light and Word in Ben Sira’s Wisdom Instruction.’ In Cognitive Linguistic Explorations in Biblical Studies, edited by Bonnie Howe and Joel B. Green, 121–43. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.
• “Creation, Torah, and Revealed Wisdom in Some Second Temple Sapiential Texts (Sirach, 4QInstruction, 4Q185, and 4Q525): A Response to John Kampen.” In Canonicity, Setting, Wisdom in the Deuterocanonicals: Papers of the Jubilee Meeting of the International Conference on the Deuterocanonical Books, edited by Géza G. Xeravits, et al., 121–44. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.
• “Intersecting Identities and Persuasive Speech: The Cases of Judah and Esther.” Biblical Interpretation 23 (2015): 340–68. doi: 10.1163/15685152-00230A03
• “Attentive Ears and Forward-Looking Eyes: Disciplining the Senses and Forming the Self in the Book of Proverbs.” Journal of Jewish Studies 66, no. 2 (2015): 242–64. doi: 10.18647/3233/JJS-2015
• “Honey and Wormwood: Taste and the Embodiment of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs.” HeBAI 5 (2016): 23-41.
• “Moving and Thinking: Kinesthesis and Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs.” In Sounding Sensory Profiles in the Ancient Near East, edited by Annette Schellenberg and Thomas Krüger. ANEM 25, 69-85. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019.