Molly Zahn is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School, where she specializes in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism. She received her BA from the University of Minnesota, her MPhil from Oxford University, and her PhD from the University of Notre Dame, and spent 14 years at the University of Kansas before coming to Yale in 2022.
Her research focuses on the dynamics of composition, transmission, and scripturalization in ancient Jewish textual culture. Her first book, Rethinking Rewritten Scripture (2011) analyzes the ways in which the text of the Pentateuch was still undergoing substantial development in the last centuries BCE. Her second book, Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism (2020), demonstrates that textual fluidity was the norm in early Judaism, and explores the implications of this observation for traditional models of the development and canonization of the books of the Hebrew Bible. Professor Zahn is also the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls and related issues, with special interest in the methodological implications of the Qumran scrolls for biblical scholarship. Her current project focuses on the Temple Scroll, a major Dead Sea Scrolls manuscript that reconfigures earlier law to create a set of divinely-voiced instructions for a utopian temple plan.
She has served as the Executive Editor of the Brill journal Dead Sea Discoveries and as Secretary of the International Organization of Qumran Studies.