Jacob L. Wright
American writer
Jacob L. Wright is an American biblical scholar currently serving as professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University. Prior to his Emory appointment, Wright taught at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), one of the foremost research-oriented public universities in Europe, for several years. His areas of expertise include Biblical Archaeology, warfare in the Ancient Near East, and the literary and redaction history of the Hebrew Bible canon. He has published extensively throughout his career, authoring several books and dozens of articles which span topics such as Ezra-Nehemiah, the Persian period, warfare in the Ancient Near East; as well as the material culture of the ancient Levant, the unique role of women in the Hebrew Bible, and larger themes such as defeat, peoplehood, and national identity in the Hebrew Bible. Areas of concentration in war studies include war commemoration, urbicide and ritual violence, and feasting and gift-giving.
Background
After receiving his BA with honors at UMKC in 1996, majoring in history and Jewish Studies, with a minor in philosophy, Wright then matriculated at the University of Göttingen. During that time, Wright was also part of several research groups, including one collating the Cairo Geniza fragments of Avot de Rabbi Nathan, and another on early Jewish prayers in their narrative contexts, which was the first group in theology to receive the Emmy Noether Grant from the German Research Foundation. He wrote his dissertation under Reinhard Gregor Kratz as his first doctoral student.
After being granted a Doctor Theologiae from Göttingen in 2003, he worked as part of the editorial team for De Gruyter in Berlin preparing an exhaustive list of lemmata for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception History. In 2004, he was hired as Jan Gertz's first assistant in his chair at the University of Heidelberg where he taught courses, began an Habilitation, and participated for several seasons at the Ramat Rachel Excavations with Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jacob L. Wright” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.