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Ron Hendel

University of California, Berkeley, Dept. of Near Eastern Studies, Faculty Member

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Norma and Sam Dabby Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies.

I approach the Hebrew Bible from a variety of angles -- history of religions, textual criticism, linguistics, comparative mythology, literature, cultural memory. I have several ongoing projects, including The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition (HBCE), for which I'm a general editor, and a commentary on Genesis for the Yale Anchor Bible commentary series. My latest books are The Book of Genesis: A Biography (Princeton Univ. Press, 2013), Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (SBL Press, 2016), and How Old is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study, co-written with Jan Joosten (Yale Univ. Press, 2018).
Address: Dept. of Near Eastern Studies
276 Barrows Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1940

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Johannes Zachhuber

University of Oxford

Australian Catholic University

Richard P Martin

Stanford University

Tallinn University

Eva Botella-Ordinas

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Andrea Squitieri

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Francesca Gazzano

University of Genova

Andrea Brazzoduro

Università Degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale"

Yale University

University of Zurich, Switzerland

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Books by Ron Hendel

Genesis 1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary

Anchor Yale Bible 1A; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024.

How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study

Anchor Bible Reference Library; Yale University Press, 2018.

All royalties are donated to the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If you’... more

Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible

The Book of Genesis: A Biography

(ed.) Reading Genesis: Ten Methods

Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible

The Text of Genesis 1-11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition

The Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob Cycle and the Narrative Traditions of Canaan and Israel

Papers by Ron Hendel

Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period: The Great and Little Traditions

Jewish Studies on Premodern Periods: A Handbook, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Sara R. Horowitz (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023), 63-76.

Exodus, Conquest, and the Alchemy of Memory

Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of P. Kyle McCarter Jr., eds. Christopher A. Rollston, Susanna Garfein, and Neil H. Walls (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2022), 107-36.

TAM in Sam: On the Tense-Aspect-Mood System in Classical Biblical Hebrew

unpublished

Often an object placed in one class on account of one or more of its properties may reappear in a... more Often an object placed in one class on account of one or more of its properties may reappear in another class because of other properties. Jean d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia 1 Some twenty-five years ago I published a modest proposal about the semantic axes of the verbal system in classical biblical Hebrew. 2 The model I proposed made sense to me then and still mostly does now, but I will add refinements to improve it. At the time I was attempting to synthesize the sturdy philology of Northwest Semitic historical linguistics with the categories of general linguistics, mostly gleaned from the crisp prose of the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (especially Bernard Comrie's books on tense and aspect). 3 I was dissatisfied with the treatment of tense and aspect in Bruce Waltke and Michael O'Connor's otherwise superb 1 J. d'Alembert, Discours préliminaire (1751): "Mais souvent tel objet qui par une ou plusieurs de ses propriétés a été placé dans une classe, tient à une autre classe par d'autres propriétés."

Giants in the Bible and the Shanhaijing: A Study in Comparative Anthropology.

Journal of Jewish Studies (Shandong) 18 (2022): 43-61.

The Shapira Scrolls: The Case for Forgery

by Ron Hendel and Matthieu Richelle

Biblical Archaeology Review 47/4 (2021): 39-46.

THE SHAPIRA SCROLLS, WHICH PURPORTEDLY RECORD Moses' s last words, are 19th-century forgeries, as... more THE SHAPIRA SCROLLS, WHICH PURPORTEDLY RECORD Moses' s last words, are 19th-century forgeries, as scholars have long maintained.* We will show this with new evidence, which has been sitting in a box fi rst in the British Museum and then in the British Library for 140 years. How can you tell whether a document is genuine or forged? Th e answer is both simple and diffi cult. You act like a detective-examine all the evidence meticulously and look for clues. As Sherlock Holmes says, you must "observe the small facts upon which large inferences may depend. " Th e clues, and the inferences based on them, combine to form a clear picture. We will explore the evidence that proves the Shapira Scrolls are forgeries. 1 But fi rst we have to give some background, beginning with some curious events in the 1870s. Th at decade was, as the late biblical scholar and epigrapher Frank Moore Cross remarked, "a season of monumental forgeries. " 2 In the years after the publication in 1870 of the ninthcentury B.C.E. royal stele known as the Moabite Stone,** the antiquities market in Jerusalem was fl ooded with fake Moabite inscriptions and artifacts. Th ese were available for purchase at Moses W. Shapira' s shop at what is now 76 Christian Quarter Street in Jerusalem' s Old City. Shapira sold most of his "Moabite" artifacts (some 1,700 items) to the Royal Museum in Berlin in 1875 for the princely sum of 22,000 thalers-nowadays around $250,000. Soon

How Old is the Hebrew Bible? A Response to Konrad Schmid

ZAW 133 (2021): 361-70

Prologue to The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition (HBCE)

Chapter 1 of Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (2016)

The concept of the "definitive text" corresponds only to religion or exhaustion.-Jorge luis borge... more

Notes on the Orthography of the Shapira Manuscripts: The Forger's Marks

ZAW 133 (2021): 225-30.

The Shapira manuscripts, putatively precursors of Deuteronomy, have many indications of forgery, ... more The Shapira manuscripts, putatively precursors of Deuteronomy, have
many indications of forgery, particularly in the orthography, which mixes the writing conventions of the Mesha stele and the Hebrew Bible. Notably, the consistent use of waw, instead of he, to mark final ō is an anachronism. These problems were not perceivable by the text’s nineteenth century critics (or its forgers), but in hindsight are clear marks of the forger’s art.

Sex, Honor, and Civilization in Genesis 1-11

With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan, eds. Tracy M. Lemos, Jordan D. Rosenblum, Karen B. Stern, and Debra S. Ballantine (Atlanta: SBL, 2021), 129-47.

Émile Durkheim observed that every mythology "is a morality and a cosmology, even as it is a hist... more Émile Durkheim observed that every mythology "is a morality and a cosmology, even as it is a history. " 1 The mythology of Gen 1-11 embodies a moral code, or perhaps better a double version of a moral code, with different emphases in the Priestly text and the Yahwistic text. These representations of morality are richly connected to the domains of sex, honor, and civilization. I will explore the interconnections of these domains as they figure in the moral relationships in the stories, and in their different configurations in the two source texts. First I address some preliminaries about myth and morality. Myth is an apt literary form to articulate the practices and sensibilities of a moral community, since it embeds them in the behaviors of particular individuals and sets them in an era when the world and its distinctive traits were gradually crystallizing into their present form. 2 Like all narrative, myth focuses the audience's attention onto the protagonists' moral emotions through a subjective form of engagement. In this respect, the moral code of Gen 1-11 is expressed through action and dialogue rather than explicit rules, with the occasional exception of God's prescriptions about morality. The picture of the moral world that develops in these stories is constructed from an assemblage of practices and personal relationships, together with their motivations and consequences. They exemplify what Bernard Williams calls "thick" moral concepts, that is, concepts that are embedded in a particular social world and are not 3.

The Landscape of Memory: Giants and the Conquest of Canaan

Collective Identity and Collective Memory: Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History in Their Context, eds. Johannes U. Ro and Diana Edelman, BZAW 534 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 263-88.

Gods in Translation and Location

Mighty Baal: Essays in Honor of Mark S. Smith, eds. Stephen C. Russell and Esther J. Hamori (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 119-37

Abram's Journey as Nexus: Literarkritik and Literary Criticism

Vetus Testamentum 69 (2019), 567-93.

A plea for the complementarity of Literarkritik and literary criticism in biblical scholarship , ... more A plea for the complementarity of Literarkritik and literary criticism in biblical scholarship , with a partial genealogy of recent developments, followed by a detailed study of Abram's journey in Gen 11:27-12:9 in the non-P and P texts. Particular attention is paid to stylistic repetitions and implicit links to other texts, yielding a nexus of foreshadowings and backshadowings in each of the component texts. Conclusions include the viability of this non-P text (formerly known as J) and the P text as continuous sources in the Pentateuch, each with a distinctive poetics.

Genesis 1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary

Anchor Yale Bible 1A; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024.

How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study

Anchor Bible Reference Library; Yale University Press, 2018.

All royalties are donated to the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If you’... more

Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible

The Book of Genesis: A Biography

(ed.) Reading Genesis: Ten Methods

Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible

The Text of Genesis 1-11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition

The Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob Cycle and the Narrative Traditions of Canaan and Israel

Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period: The Great and Little Traditions

Jewish Studies on Premodern Periods: A Handbook, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Sara R. Horowitz (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023), 63-76.

Exodus, Conquest, and the Alchemy of Memory

Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of P. Kyle McCarter Jr., eds. Christopher A. Rollston, Susanna Garfein, and Neil H. Walls (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2022), 107-36.

TAM in Sam: On the Tense-Aspect-Mood System in Classical Biblical Hebrew

unpublished

Often an object placed in one class on account of one or more of its properties may reappear in a... more Often an object placed in one class on account of one or more of its properties may reappear in another class because of other properties. Jean d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia 1 Some twenty-five years ago I published a modest proposal about the semantic axes of the verbal system in classical biblical Hebrew. 2 The model I proposed made sense to me then and still mostly does now, but I will add refinements to improve it. At the time I was attempting to synthesize the sturdy philology of Northwest Semitic historical linguistics with the categories of general linguistics, mostly gleaned from the crisp prose of the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (especially Bernard Comrie's books on tense and aspect). 3 I was dissatisfied with the treatment of tense and aspect in Bruce Waltke and Michael O'Connor's otherwise superb 1 J. d'Alembert, Discours préliminaire (1751): "Mais souvent tel objet qui par une ou plusieurs de ses propriétés a été placé dans une classe, tient à une autre classe par d'autres propriétés."

Giants in the Bible and the Shanhaijing: A Study in Comparative Anthropology.

Journal of Jewish Studies (Shandong) 18 (2022): 43-61.

The Shapira Scrolls: The Case for Forgery

by Ron Hendel and Matthieu Richelle

Biblical Archaeology Review 47/4 (2021): 39-46.

THE SHAPIRA SCROLLS, WHICH PURPORTEDLY RECORD Moses' s last words, are 19th-century forgeries, as... more THE SHAPIRA SCROLLS, WHICH PURPORTEDLY RECORD Moses' s last words, are 19th-century forgeries, as scholars have long maintained.* We will show this with new evidence, which has been sitting in a box fi rst in the British Museum and then in the British Library for 140 years. How can you tell whether a document is genuine or forged? Th e answer is both simple and diffi cult. You act like a detective-examine all the evidence meticulously and look for clues. As Sherlock Holmes says, you must "observe the small facts upon which large inferences may depend. " Th e clues, and the inferences based on them, combine to form a clear picture. We will explore the evidence that proves the Shapira Scrolls are forgeries. 1 But fi rst we have to give some background, beginning with some curious events in the 1870s. Th at decade was, as the late biblical scholar and epigrapher Frank Moore Cross remarked, "a season of monumental forgeries. " 2 In the years after the publication in 1870 of the ninthcentury B.C.E. royal stele known as the Moabite Stone,** the antiquities market in Jerusalem was fl ooded with fake Moabite inscriptions and artifacts. Th ese were available for purchase at Moses W. Shapira' s shop at what is now 76 Christian Quarter Street in Jerusalem' s Old City. Shapira sold most of his "Moabite" artifacts (some 1,700 items) to the Royal Museum in Berlin in 1875 for the princely sum of 22,000 thalers-nowadays around $250,000. Soon

How Old is the Hebrew Bible? A Response to Konrad Schmid

ZAW 133 (2021): 361-70

Prologue to The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition (HBCE)

Chapter 1 of Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (2016)

The concept of the "definitive text" corresponds only to religion or exhaustion.-Jorge luis borge... more

Notes on the Orthography of the Shapira Manuscripts: The Forger's Marks

ZAW 133 (2021): 225-30.

The Shapira manuscripts, putatively precursors of Deuteronomy, have many indications of forgery, ... more The Shapira manuscripts, putatively precursors of Deuteronomy, have
many indications of forgery, particularly in the orthography, which mixes the writing conventions of the Mesha stele and the Hebrew Bible. Notably, the consistent use of waw, instead of he, to mark final ō is an anachronism. These problems were not perceivable by the text’s nineteenth century critics (or its forgers), but in hindsight are clear marks of the forger’s art.

Sex, Honor, and Civilization in Genesis 1-11

With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan, eds. Tracy M. Lemos, Jordan D. Rosenblum, Karen B. Stern, and Debra S. Ballantine (Atlanta: SBL, 2021), 129-47.

Émile Durkheim observed that every mythology "is a morality and a cosmology, even as it is a hist... more Émile Durkheim observed that every mythology "is a morality and a cosmology, even as it is a history. " 1 The mythology of Gen 1-11 embodies a moral code, or perhaps better a double version of a moral code, with different emphases in the Priestly text and the Yahwistic text. These representations of morality are richly connected to the domains of sex, honor, and civilization. I will explore the interconnections of these domains as they figure in the moral relationships in the stories, and in their different configurations in the two source texts. First I address some preliminaries about myth and morality. Myth is an apt literary form to articulate the practices and sensibilities of a moral community, since it embeds them in the behaviors of particular individuals and sets them in an era when the world and its distinctive traits were gradually crystallizing into their present form. 2 Like all narrative, myth focuses the audience's attention onto the protagonists' moral emotions through a subjective form of engagement. In this respect, the moral code of Gen 1-11 is expressed through action and dialogue rather than explicit rules, with the occasional exception of God's prescriptions about morality. The picture of the moral world that develops in these stories is constructed from an assemblage of practices and personal relationships, together with their motivations and consequences. They exemplify what Bernard Williams calls "thick" moral concepts, that is, concepts that are embedded in a particular social world and are not 3.

The Landscape of Memory: Giants and the Conquest of Canaan

Collective Identity and Collective Memory: Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History in Their Context, eds. Johannes U. Ro and Diana Edelman, BZAW 534 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 263-88.

Gods in Translation and Location

Mighty Baal: Essays in Honor of Mark S. Smith, eds. Stephen C. Russell and Esther J. Hamori (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 119-37

Abram's Journey as Nexus: Literarkritik and Literary Criticism

Vetus Testamentum 69 (2019), 567-93.

A plea for the complementarity of Literarkritik and literary criticism in biblical scholarship , ... more A plea for the complementarity of Literarkritik and literary criticism in biblical scholarship , with a partial genealogy of recent developments, followed by a detailed study of Abram's journey in Gen 11:27-12:9 in the non-P and P texts. Particular attention is paid to stylistic repetitions and implicit links to other texts, yielding a nexus of foreshadowings and backshadowings in each of the component texts. Conclusions include the viability of this non-P text (formerly known as J) and the P text as continuous sources in the Pentateuch, each with a distinctive poetics.

The Life of Metaphor in Song of Songs: Poetics, Canon, and the Cultural Bible

Biblica 100 (2019), 60-83.

Myth and Mimesis in the Psalm of Jonah

Psalms In/On Jerusalem, eds. Ilana Pardes and Ophir Münz-Manor, Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts 9 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 1-10.

Not all the psalms of Jerusalem are in the book of Psalms. One of the most eloquent is a prayer b... more Not all the psalms of Jerusalem are in the book of Psalms. One of the most eloquent is a prayer by the wayward prophet Jonah in Jonah 2:3-10. After being swallowed at Yahweh's command by a "big fish," Jonah utters a psalm of thanksgiving from the belly of the beast. By the end of the psalm, however, Jonah seems to be in Jerusalem, offering a thanksgiving sacrifice at the temple. According to the rhetoric of the psalm, he is "semiotically" in Jerusalem, even as the fish turns to vomit him out at Nineveh. The situation of the speaker complicates the temporal and spatial dynamics (what Bakhtin calls the "chronotope") of this psalm of Jerusalem (Bakhtin 1981, 85-258).1

Politics and Poetics in the Ancestral Narratives

The Politics of the Ancestors: Exegetical and Historical Perspectives on Genesis 12-36, eds. Mark Brett and Jakob Wöhrle, FAT 124 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 11-34.

Creating the Jews: Mosaic Discourse in Freud and Hosea

Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion, eds. Gilad Sharvit and Karen S. Feldman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 157-76.

The Exodus in America

Found in Translation: Essays on Jewish Biblical Translation in Honor of Leonard J. Greenspoon, eds. James W. Barker, Anthony Le Donne, and Joel N. Lohr (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2018), 155-78.

Masoretic Texts and Ancient Texts Close to MT

The Hebrew Bible, Vol 1B: Pentateuch, Former and Latter Prophets, eds. Armin Lange and Emanuel Tov (Textual History of the Bible; Leiden: Brill, , 2017), 59-72

The Epistemology of Textual Criticism

Reading the Bible in Ancient Traditions and Modern Editions: Studies in Memory of Peter W. Flint, eds. Andrew B. Perrin, Kyung S. Baek, and Daniel K. Falk (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017), 245-67.

The point is that this is how we play the game. There are also rules, but they do not form a syst... more

God and the Gods in the Tetrateuch

The Origins of Yahwism, eds. Jürgen van Oorschot and Markus Witte (BZAW 484; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 239-66

The Sayings of Chairman Tom (or) The Phantom of the Surface Structure [Adages of Thomas O. Lambdin]

Historical Linguistics of Biblical Hebrew: An Outline

Biblical Scholar (song, review of Genesis 1-11, AB)

YouTube video (click on 2 Files)

Benjamin Sommer, review of How Old is the Hebrew Bible?

Journal of Religion 100 (2020): 511-13.

Jonathan Kirsch, "The Bible Under a Microscope." (review of How Old is the Hebrew Bible?)

Jewish Journal, December 12, 2018

Eugene Ulrich, review of Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible. Journal of Semitic Studies.

Haihua Tian, "History and Cultural Memory: Ronald Hendel's Biblical Interpretation." Biblical Literature Studies 2014, pp. 397-414 (in Chinese).

Scott McLemee, "In the Beginning." Inside Higher Ed.

Martien Halvorson-Taylor, review of Remembering Abraham. Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

The Political Power of Sacred Texts. Conference Held at the American Academy in Rome, 19 October 2017. Program and Abstracts.

by Dominik Markl and Ron Hendel

Orientalism and Hebrew Bible Scholarship

The Bible and Interpretation (https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/), 2024

Hebrew Bible. In my view, such postmodern disavowals of universal conceptsincluding knowledge, em... more Hebrew Bible. In my view, such postmodern disavowals of universal conceptsincluding knowledge, empathy, tolerance, equality, and inalienable human rights-are symptoms of something deeper, a reaction to the uncertainty of the modern world and the decline of the humanities. We need not retreat into all-or-nothing thinking and esoteric governmental conspiracies. To paraphrase a Renaissance author who had his own issues, the fault is not in Orientalism, but in ourselves.

The Bible in Public Schools

Yale University Press

Why Write a Biblical Commentary?

TheTorah.com, 2023

Select volumes from the Anchor Bible and the JPS Torah and Bible Commentary series riting a comme... more

A Brief Note on Scholarship in a Time of War

Ten Theses on Academic Freedom and Biblical Scholarship