Ancient Israel and Judaism

Hanna Tervanotko is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University. She specializes in the Jewish literature of the Second Temple era and its cross-cultural connections with the Classical Greek texts. Her research concentrates on two main themes: female figures in ancient Jewish texts and Greek and Jewish divination. In her monograph (2016), she examines the portrayal of Miriam in the ancient texts, which have led her to ask more broadly about the status of female figures, women and gender reflected in the ancient literature. In her second book she explores methods of divination referred to in the ancient Jewish texts in the broader cultural contexts of ancient Eastern Mediterranean. While doing this, she sometimes looks at the material through the lens of comparative religion, whereas other times she relies on earlier studies on cultural continuum. 

Raphael Greenberg is Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. His focus in recent years has been on two distinct fields: Levantine Bronze Age research, and the meaning and impact of archaeology in the present. His Bronze Age research, most recently summarized in a monograph, The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant (Cambridge, 2019), covers questions such as the formation and dissolution of early urban societies in the Levant, long and mid-range interaction, migration and trade, and social and economic aspects of ceramic industries (most recently, the Kura-Araxes interaction sphere). HIs work on archaeology in the present includes teaching and writing about the community archaeology, the colonial legacy of archaeology in Palestine and Israel, and the politics of the archaeology of ancient Jerusalem. These interests are brought into relation with one another through a commitment to critical archaeology and to the investigation of perennially relevant questions such as time, migration and transmission of culture, and material culture and its agency.