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William Schniedewind

Professor; Graduate Advisor

E-mail: williams@humnet.ucla.edu Office: 380 Kaplan Hall

William Schniedewind is Professor of Biblical Studies and Northwest Semitic Languages. He was the inaugural holder of the Kershaw Term Chair in Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies, and he served as the NELC Department Chair for many years. His books and articles cover a wide range of topics relating to biblical studies, Dead Sea Scrolls, and ancient languages and inscriptions. His research and teaching combines the study of literature, language, and archaeology. At UCLA, he teaches undergraduate classes on “Introduction to Biblical Literature,” “Jerusalem, the Holy City,” “Ancient Israelite Religion,” and “Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Judaism.” His graduate seminars cover the various biblical literature and Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient inscriptions, History of the Hebrew Language, and the Ugaritic language. He has supervised over thirty dissertations for a diverse cohort of students now teaching at colleges and universities throughout the world.

Education

PhD, MA, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University
MA, Historical Geography of Ancient Israel, Jerusalem University College
BA, Religion, George Fox University

Research

Hebrew Bible
Northwest Semitics
Second Temple Judaism
Social and Cultural History of Ancient Israel
Inner-biblical and Early Jewish Interpretation
Sociolinguistics of Classical Hebrew Language

Publications

Books

How the Bible Became a Book

Cambridge University Press, 2004
A Primer on Ugaritic: Language, Culture and Literature

Cambridge University Press, 2007
Social History of Hebrew: Its Origins Through the Rabbinic Period

Yale University Press, 2013
The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible

Oxford University Press, 2019
Torah: Functions, Meanings, and Diverse Manifestations in Early Judaism and Christianity

SBL, 2021

Additional Books

Society and the Promise to David: A Reception History of 2 Samuel 7:1-17, Oxford University Press, 1999.
The Word of God in Transition: From Prophet to Exegete in the Second Temple Period. JSOTSS, 197. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1995.
Editor, The Tel El-Amarna Correspondence, Volume 1, by Anson F. Rainey. Leiden: Brill, 2015.