Most of my work relates to Israelite and Jewish wisdom literature, especially Job,
Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, and sapiential texts among the
Dead Sea Scrolls. I have a particular affection for the Gilgamesh Epic, which Rainer
Maria Rilke called “the most magic word of all time." I am the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament editor for the Illuminations commentary series, published by Wm. B. Eerdmans. In 2014 and 2018, I was an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at Georg-August-Universität
Göttingen, where I worked on a project entitled “The Role of the Wisdom Psalms in
the Theology of the First Davidic Psalter” under the supervision of Hermann Spieckermann.
I am also writing a commentary on the Book of Job for the Old Testament Library Series.
Membership: Society of Biblical Literature
I enjoy family vacations, playing with my dogs, watching British mysteries, and building
electric guitars for a business I started called Slow Train Guitars.
I regularly teach the following courses at Covenant College:
- BIB 111: Old Testament Introduction
- BIB 327: Psalms
- BIB 395: Current Issues in Biblical Studies
- BIB 450: The Old Testament World
- BIB 475: Wisdom Literature
- HEB 191-192: Elementary Hebrew I-II
- “Job,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and the Bible, ed. Will Kynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 533-550.
- “Who Can Narrate El’s Wonders? The Reception of Psalm 19 in Ben Sira and the Qumran
Hodayot,” in Fromme und Frevler. Studien zu Psalmen und Weisheit. Festschrift für Hermann Spieckermann
zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. C. Körting and R. G. Kratz. FAT I. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. 31-40.
- Psalm 37 and the Devotionalization of Instruction in the Post-Exilic Period," in Prayers and the Construction of Israelite Identity, ed. Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher and Maria Häusl. AIL 35. Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2019. 167-188.
- "The Proverbial Rhetoric of Job 28," in Reading Proverbs Intertextually, ed. Katharine Dell and Will Kynes. LHBOTS 629. London: T&T Clark Bloomsbury, 2019.
77-88.
- “When the Morning Stars Sang”: Essays in Honor of Choon Leong Seow on the Occasion
of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Scott C. Jones and Christine Roy Yoder. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche
Wissenschaft 500. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.
- “Psalm 1 and the Hermeneutics of Torah,” Biblica 97 (2016): 537-551.
- “Job the Nazi Warrior,” Marginalia Review of Books (2015): online. This is an introduction, edited text, and translation of Kurt Eggers’ Das Spiel von Job dem Deutschen. Ein Mysterium. Berlin-Südende: Volkschaft Verlag für Buch-Bühne und Film, 1933.
- “Solomon’s Table Talk: Martin Luther on the Authorship of Ecclesiastes,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 28 (2014): 81-90.
- “The Values and Limits of Qohelet’s Sub-Celestial Economy,” Vetus Testamentum 64 (2014): 21-33.
- “Corporeal Discourse in the Book of Job,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 132 (2013): 845-863.
- “Job 28 and Modern Theories of Knowledge,” Theology Today 69 (2013): 486-496.
- “Lions, Serpents, and Lion-Serpents in Job 28:8 and Beyond,” Journal of Biblical Literature 130 (2011): 663-686.
- Rumors of Wisdom: Job 28 as Poetry. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 398. Berlin: De Gruyter,
2009.
- “Qohelet's Courtly Wisdom: Ecclesiastes 8:1-9,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 68 (2006): 211-28.
- “Wisdom's Pedagogy: A Comparison of Proverbs vii and 4Q184,” Vetus Testamentum 53 (2003): 65-80.
