On Bible & Judaism

Since my dissertation on the book of Jeremiah, I’ve been engaged with the question of whether we can better understand the Hebrew Scriptures by reading them as philosophical texts. Many people assume that the biblical texts are “revelation,” and that they are supposed to be read mostly for what they have to tell us about miracles or the afterlife. But the Hebrew Bible doesn’t seem to be primarily about these things. The biblical works are much more similar to other works of reason composed in antiquity, which were written to advance certain views about politics and morals, metaphysics and theology.

In 2009, I organized the first of a series of annual conferences at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem for scholars of philosophy, political theory, Bible and other disciplines who are interested in exploring the philosophy of the biblical authors. A year later, I was awarded a grant by the John Templeton Foundation to conduct an international research initiative on the philosophical investigation of the Hebrew Bible, Talmud and Midrash. This was called the Jewish Philosophical Theology Project, of which I served as director unto 2018.

My book The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge, 2012) is an introduction to this subject. A follow-up volume is God and Politics in Esther (Cambridge, 2016). I have since co-edited two volumes of essays based on work done under the auspices of the Jewish Philosophical Theology Project: The Question of God’s Perfection (Brill, 2019) and The Revelation at Sinai: What Does “Torah from Heaven” Mean? (Ktav, 2022).

Books

Yoram Hazony, Gil Student and Alex Sztuden, eds., The Revelation at Sinai: What Does ‘Torah from Heaven’ Mean? (New York: Ktav, 2021).

Yoram Hazony and Dru Johnson, eds., The Question of God’s Perfection: Jewish and Christian Essays on the God of the Bible and Talmud (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

God and Politics in Esther (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Aaron Wildavsky, Moses as Political Leader, Yoram Hazony, edited with introduction (Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2005).

Articles

“Torah from Heaven: Moses and Sinai in Exodus,” in Yoram Hazony, Gil Student and Alex Sztuden, eds., The Revelation at Sinai: What Does ‘Torah from Heaven’ Mean? (New York: Ktav, 2021), pp. 1-74.

“Is God ‘Perfect Being’?” in Yoram Hazony and Dru Johnson, eds., The Question of God’s Perfection: Jewish and Christian Essays on the God of the Bible and Talmud (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 9-26.

“The Bible and Leo Strauss,” Perspectives on Political Science 45 (Summer 2016), pp. 190-207.

“Three Replies: On Revelation, Natural Law, and Autonomy in Jewish Theology,” Journal of Analytic Theology 3 (2015), pp. 172-205.

“The Political Thought of the Biblical Narrative, Genesis-Kings,” Jonathan Jacobs, ed., Judaic Sources and Western Thought, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

“Jerusalem and Carthage,” Hebraic Political Studies (Summer 2008)

“Does the Bible Have a Political Teaching?” Hebraic Political Studies, (Winter 2006)

“Judaism and the Modern State,” Azure 21 (Summer 2005)

“The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience Tradition,” Azure 4 (Summer 1998)