Jewish Studies Seminar with Jillian Stinchcomb: "An Absent Presence? The Masoretes in the Study of the Bible"

The Yale Jewish Studies Seminar, organized by graduate students, invites junior and mid-career scholars to campus to present their Jewish Studies research in a seminar setting with the university community.  All are warmly invited to attend.

This talk explores the conceptual tension between the Masoretic tradition and academic discourses of the original text of the Hebrew Bible. While biblical reception history has long studied the influence of the Bible on later cultures, and the historical study of ancient Israel has emphasized the contemporaneous cultures and texts which influenced biblical traditions, the Masoretes who produced the form of the Hebrew Bible most read today often fall into the interstices between these fields. This talk will explore the Masoretes in the academic study of the Bible and further consider how an increased sensitivity to alternate temporalities can help to better integrate this influential group into our narratives of the history of the Bible.

Jillian Stinchcomb is assistant professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies and History Departments at Towson University. She is a scholar of premodern religion with a focus on the Hebrew Bible and biblical reception history. She studies the formation, canonization and reception of biblical texts and traditions, with special attention to the ways gender and other modes of social difference are constructed with and through texts. Her current book project, The Queen of Sheba between the Bible and the Kebra Nagast, closely examines how a minor figure in Solomon's life became a shared and contested authoritative figure in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities.