Dr. Hila Dayfani

Hila Dayfani wrote her Ph.D. dissertation at Bar-Ilan University under the supervision of Prof. Nili Samet and Prof. Emanuel Tov from the Hebrew University (2020). After completing her dissertation, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University as part of the SQE research project and at the Centre for the Study of the Bible at the University of Oxford. Dr. Dayfani’s research focuses on biblical studies, Second Temple literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Her first monograph, The Transmission of the Pentateuch (De Gruyter 2023), combines tools from the field of textual criticism and paleography to trace the activity of the ancient scribes in Judah and Samaria who copied and transmitted the Pentateuch and examine the scope of the transmission process in the last centuries BCE. Her current project ay Mandel Scholion deals with the conception of the Torah as a unified literary work and the relationship between its five books in the Second Temple period.

Select Publications:

 

"The Relationship between Paleography and Textual Criticism: Textual Variants Due to Graphic Similarity between the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch as a Test Case.” Textus 27 (2018): 3–21.

“Rethinking the Textual Value of 4Q11 (4QpaleoGen-Exodl).” Textus 30 (2021): 105–129.

 “The Scope of the Transmission of the Pentateuch in the Second Temple Period.” Journal of Ancient Judaism 13 (2022): 1–29.

“4QpaleoExodm and the Gerizim Composition.” Journal of Biblical Literature 141 (2022): 673–698.

“Material Reconstruction of 4Q22 in Aid of Literary Criticism of the Book of Exodus.” Advances in Ancient Biblical and Near Eastern Research (2023).

 

Dr. Hanan Mazeh

Hanan Mazeh is a scholar of late-antique Rabbinic Literature. His research explores textual and thematic developments in this corpus as a key to understanding Rabbinic society in the first centuries CE within its cultural context. His particular expertise is the Palestinian Talmud (the Yerushalmi) and its unique texture, and he is especially interested in questions of territory and relations between Jews and Gentiles in Roman Palestine. Mazeh completed his PhD in Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2020. He has been a postdoctoral fellow in a collaborative project by the Chronoi-Einstein Center in Berlin and the Hebrew University (2020) as well as at Ben-Gurion University (2020-21), and a research fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania (2021-22), as a Rothschild and Fulbright awardee, and at the New York University School of Law (2022-23). His project at the Mandel Scholion Center examines the paradigm shift in the organization of knowledge and legal discourse within the rabbinic academy in third- and forth-century Roman Palestine, as reflected in the Palestinian Talmud. Its particular focus is on textual transfers, internal adaptations and cross references taking place in the early stages of this text’s formation.