Julia Rhyder

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities
Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Rhyder
Harvard – NELC, #308 6 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-496-9049
juliarhyder@fas.harvard.edu
Website
Publications

Julia Rhyder is a specialist of the Hebrew Bible with a particular interest in ritual texts and the history of the Israelite cult. 

She is the author of Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17–26 (Mohr Siebeck, 2019), which was awarded the 2021 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. She is also the co-editor of several books, including Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch: A Systematic and Comparative Approach (Penn State University Press, 2021), Authorship and the Hebrew Bible (Mohr Siebeck, 2022), and Collective Violence and Memory in the Ancient Mediterranean (Brill 2023). In 2021, Professor Rhyder was honored with the David Noel Freedman Award for Excellence and Creativity in Hebrew Bible Scholarship for her work on the pig prohibition in ancient Judaism. 

Professor Rhyder is currently completing a monograph on calendrical festivals and war commemoration in the Hebrew Bible, in which she presents a new history of how war shaped the Israelite calendar from the oldest biblical traditions to Second Temple writings. In 2024, she was granted a Beaufort Visiting Fellowship at St John’s College, University of Cambridge to advance the book project. She is also writing a commentary on Leviticus for the Hermeneia series (Fortress Press).

Website: https://scholar.harvard.edu/juliarhyder

Publications can be found at academia.edu.

Research Interests:

  • ritual texts of the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple traditions
  • ancient Syro-Palestinian history, especially the history of Israelite religion
  • the compositional history of the Pentateuch, especially the Priestly traditions
  • the Hebrew Bible in its ancient Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean context
  • biblical law
  • warfare and memory