About Me

I was born in 1959 in St. Petersburg, Russia. At that time, the beautiful city was called Leningrad, and the country was called the Soviet Union. That is why in my childhood I hardly ever heard the word “Bible,” and the first time I opened it was not until I was 14 or 15. It was not exactly banned, but neither was it easy to get. Nor was there such thing as majoring in college in Biblical Studies or Religious Studies. So, even though the Bible (including both Testaments) fascinated me from the outset I majored instead in Modern History and eventually earned a Russian equivalent of Ph.D. in that field (my first doctoral dissertation was, of all things, on nineteenth-century Jamaica). Despite that, I had to settle for a junior research fellowship at a large library, known today as the National Library of Russia. Being Jewish, I could get a full-time teaching position in humanities only by constantly proving my loyalty to the Communist Party, and I considered that both dastardly and humiliating.

Fortunately, by that time the Soviet Union began to crumble, and in 1990 our family was able to move to Israel. There, I was almost immediately invited to join an advanced program in Jewish Studies launched by Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem; it included broad and intensive training in the part of the Bible that is sacred to both Jews (who call it Tanakh) and Christians (who call it the Old Testament). Now, I was reading the Bible not in Russian but in its original language, Hebrew. In parallel, I was working for the Jewish Encyclopedia in Russian and taught at the Open University of Israel. But more importantly, I started writing articles about the Hebrew Bible and sending them to scholarly journals. To my sheer surprise, almost all of them were published. That got me thinking about finally realizing the dream I had had since my teenage years: making the study of the Bible my main profession.

It took several years, but eventually the dream came true. In 1997, I joined Ph.D. program in Religious Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, specializing in Hebrew Bible, and in 2002 I defended, under Professor Marvin A. Sweeney, my second doctoral dissertation. Later, it became a book titled The Turn of the Cycle. The same year, I was hired for my first (and hopefully last) teaching position as Nate and Ann Levine Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. 

As you can see if you click “Publications,” I have written extensively about pretty much all the parts of the Hebrew Bible, and even a bit about the New Testament and other religious texts. But all the while what has particularly piqued my interest was the long historical narrative that runs from the creation of the world in Genesis 1 through the Babylonian exile in 2 Kings 25. The more I studied it the more convinced I became that my fellow biblical scholars – for whom I have nothing but utmost respect – have been seriously wrong about both the origins and the meaning of this narrative. And the more I was writing for fellow scholars the greater was my desire to share my findings with much broader audiences – just as I share them, day in and day out, with my students.

The result is two forthcoming books – one titled The Man Who Wrote the Bible and another under the tentative heading Wrong Track: Why Modern Scholarship Has Nothing Useful to Say about the Bible’s Origins. But any publication is a one-time deal; once a book or an article is out, there is no way to add or change anything, at least not until the publisher agrees to a new edition. My interest in the Bible, and particularly in Genesis-Kings is abiding; it does not end with these two books, nor does my wish to communicate my thought as broadly as possible. That is why I have launched this site; hopefully, you will enjoy it.