Julia Rhyder is a specialist of the Hebrew Bible with a particular interest in ritual texts and the history of the Israelite cult. She combines detailed philological analysis and the methods of historical criticism with the use of anthropological and social theories to illuminate the biblical text, including ritual theory, memory studies, postcolonial theory, and discourse analysis.

Rhyder’s first book, Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17–26 (Mohr Siebeck, 2019), was awarded the 2021 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. She has since co-edited 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, Julia 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. 

Rhyder is currently completing a monograph on festivals and war commemoration in the Hebrew Bible, in which she presents a new history of how war shaped Israelite religion from the oldest biblical traditions to the Second Temple era. She was granted a Beaufort Visiting Fellowship at St John’s College, University of Cambridge in Spring 2024 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.

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Research Interests:

• ritual texts of the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple traditions
• ancient Syro-Palestinian history, especially the history of the ancient Israelite cult
• the compositional history of the Pentateuch, especially the Priestly traditions
• comparative readings of the Hebrew Bible
• biblical law
• warfare and memory
• reception history
• postcolonialism