Prof. Noam Mizrahi is a faculty member in the Department of Bible at the Hebrew University, studying ancient Hebrew literature, including the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He earned his academic degrees at the Hebrew University and had post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University (USA) and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany). In 2012, he was awarded the Allon Fellowship of the National Council for Higher Education, which enabled his appointment at Tel Aviv University, where he served as Chair of the Department of Biblical Studies (2017–19). In 2021, he returned to the Hebrew University, where he again served as Chair of the Department of Bible (2022–24) and Director of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature (since 2022).
His publications—supported by various funding agencies, including the Israel Science Foundation—explore the cross-sections of processes of literary, historical-linguistic, and textual development of these works, with particular attention to prophetic, poetic, and liturgical works. His first monograph, Witnessing a Prophetic Text in the Making (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), analyzes the history of a critical prophecy in the Book of Jeremiah. His second book, Pesher Habakkuk (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2022), is an annotated edition of one of the Qumran scrolls, a copy of an ancient commentary of a biblical prophetic book. Prof. Mizrahi is also a co-editor of the Mikra LeYisrael (‘Bible for Israel’) commentary series and of the scholarly journal Meghillot (‘Scrolls’).
In the framework of the “In Between” research group, Prof. Mizrahi will examine linguistic and literary traces of the experience of migration and exile as reflected in biblical literature. The Hebrew Bible underscores migration as a foundational aspect of the constitutional narratives of ancient Israel since its inception. It is, therefore, imperative to analyze which traces the various migratory experiences have left in the texts at our disposal. The analysis will utilize theoretical models of linguistic and sociolinguistic change anchored in fieldwork conducted in migrant communities, comparing such comparative data to the philological evidence afforded by biblical texts and their language.