Bernard M. Levinson

Bernard Malcolm Levinson serves as Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the Berman Family Chair in Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible. He is the author of "Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation", ""The Right Chorale": Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation," and "Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel"; and is the co-editor of "The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance." He has published extensively on biblical and ancient Near Eastern law and on the reception of biblical literature in the Second Temple period. His research interests extend to early modern intellectual history, constitutional theory, the history of interpretation, and literary approaches to biblical studies.
Education.
Levinson earned an Honors B.A. from York University in 1974, where he majored in Humanities and English and graduated with first class honors. He received his M.A in Religious Studies from McMaster University in 1978. Following his two years at McMaster, he spent a year as Visiting Researcher in Bible and Semitic Languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1991, under the advisor Michael Fishbane, he received a Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University.
Professional career.
Bernard Levinson began his professional teaching career at Middlebury College in Vermont, teaching there for a semester each in 1983 and 1984. In 1987, he received a fellowship as the Stroum Fellow in Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Subsequently, while working on his dissertation, he taught full-time for two years in the Religious Studies Program at The Pennsylvania State University. Upon the completion of his dissertation, he was appointed to Indiana University in Bloomington, as an assistant professor in its Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, with adjunct appointments to both Jewish Studies and Religious Studies. Midway through his appointment, he was invited to spend a year as a visiting scholar in the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Johannes Gutenberg University, in Mainz, Germany (1992–1993). After being tenured at Indiana University, he was appointed to the University of Minnesota's Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies as the first inhabitant of the Berman Family Chair in Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible. This position was the first endowed chair in the College of Liberal Arts and was seen as distinctive for confirming the significance of the academic study of religion within a public and state university. Shortly after his arrival, he received an appointment to the Law School as an affiliated faculty member. In 2009, he was promoted to the rank of full professor, and in 2010, honored as a scholar of the College of Liberal Arts 2010–2013.
The interdisciplinary significance of Levinson's work has been recognized with appointments to the Institute for Advanced Study (1997); the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (2007); and to the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle, NC), as the Henry Luce Senior Fellow in Religious Studies (2011 academic year). Bernard Levinson seeks to bring the academic biblical scholarship to the attention of a broader, non-specialist readership In this vein, he has recently written on the impact of the King James Version of the Bible upon the American Founding; drawn attention in the national press to the role of early feminist Bible scholars like Elizabeth Cady Stanton in helping win the vote for women; and, in his attention to language, has been cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.
On May 6, 2010, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, the oldest professional organization of Judaica scholars in North America. Fellows are nominated and elected by their peers and thus constitute the most distinguished and most senior scholars teaching Judaic studies at American universities.
Levinson was at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 2012–13 academic year. During his time at IAS, he co-directed an international research team on a project titled "Convergence and Divergence in Pentateuchal Theory: Bridging the Academic Cultures of Israel, North America, and Europe" and co-organized an international conference, which was held on May 12–13, 2013. The conference featured presentations from a range of scholars and sought to further international exchange and establish a shared intellectual dialogue.
More recently, Levinson has co-organized a second international conference at IAS with the title "The Pentateuch within Biblical Literature: Formation and Interaction." This upcoming conference, scheduled for May 25–29, 2014, in Jerusalem, will focus primarily on the formation of the Pentateuch and its interaction with both the prophetic corpus and the historiographic literature of the Hebrew Bible.