Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg

I teach biblical reception history—that is, I teach about the diverse ways the Hebrew Bible has been imagined and used by religious practitioners in the centuries since its canonization. My first book, The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible (Princeton University Press, 2023), argues that classical rabbinic authorities were far more ambivalent of about the idea of a written revelation than we often assume and documents practical measures these thinkers proposed to quarantine the biblical text within communal life while expanding the scope of spoken scriptural recitations within the communal realm. In doing so, The Closed Book seeks to demonstrate that early rabbinic thinkers often engaged with their canonical texts in modes that were much more similar to their Greco-Roman and Christian contemporaries than they were to later rabbinic thinkers. A recent minigraph (a very brief monograph), The Abrahamic Vernacular (Cambridge University Press, 2024), takes this focus on a shared scriptural vernacular a step further to examine the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Muslim practitioners in wide variety of times and places have co-constructed overlapping accounts of scriptural figures and concepts with practitioners from other traditions. While centering rabbinic Jewish communities, my research thus frequently looks at loci of intersection between rabbinic Jewish thinkers and neighboring communities, from early Christian lay practitioners, to late antique readers of Homer, and the medieval Muslim scholars who foreshadowed scholarly biblical criticism. 

Most of my teaching focuses on the afterlives of biblical texts in courses such as Lost Books that Rewrote the Bible, Contemporary Questions and Biblical Answers, Biblical Masculinities, and The Problem with the Bible. I also teach religious studies classes centering Jewish content in courses such as What is Judaism and Religions of the Jews.  All of my courses are gamefully graded and offer a variety of hands on activities.