Book Launch Sacred Literature in Interfaith Contexts

Scriptural Vitatlity: Rethinking Philology and Hermeneutics

13 November, 2025

We are deeply honoured to welcome Prof Hindy Najman, the Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, and Director of the Oriel Centre for the Study of the Bible at Oriel College, to present her new book, Scriptural Vitality: Rethinking Philology and Hermeneutics, in conversation with the expert panel.

About the book: Prof Hindy Najman carries out a radical rethinking of biblical studies. She challenges the view that the Persian and Hellenistic periods constitute a time of decay, a period of ‘late Judaism’, languishing between an original, vibrant Judaism and the birth of Christianity. Instead, Prof Najman argues that the Second Temple period was one of untethered creativity and poetic imagination, of dynamism exemplified through philosophical translation, poetic composition, and a convergence of ancient Mediterranean cultures that gave birth to hermeneutic innovation. She celebrates textual pluriformity and transformation, tracing ways in which texts and meanings proliferated within interpretive communities through new performances and fresh articulations of the past. As a result of this intelectual exercise, the Second Temple period emerges as a golden age of creativity, whose traces may still be discerned in Judaism and Christianity today.
An open-access title is available via Oxford Academic, under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.

About the author: Hindy Najman (MA and PhD Harvard, NELC) is the Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford, and a fellow at Oriel College. She is the director and founder of the Centre for the Study of the Bible in Oriel College. In the University of Oxford, she is a member of the faculty of Theology and Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and member of the Sub-faculty Classics, and a member of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Prior to her joining the faculty in Oxford, she had held posts at the University of Notre Dame, University of Toronto, and Yale University. Her areas of research are entanglement of Ancient Culture; Reading Practices in Jewish Antiquity; Comparative Philology; Performance; Formation of the Self and the Subject; Collection and Canon; Authority and Author Function; Biblical Figures and Exemplarity; Practices of Pseudepigraphy and Pseudonymous Attribution; Revelation; Diaspora and Exile; Trauma Studies; and Nature and Law. She has published 4 books (see the full list below), 65 articles and has edited 24 volumes. She has contributed as editor and associate editor to a variety of journals and book series, among them are Journal of Biblical Literature, Dead Sea Discoveries, and the Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series. Her current projects are on Pluriformity and Hermeneutics, Metathinking in Ancient Judaism, and Aesthetics and Poetics in ancient Jewish Song.

Date: 13 November, 2025

Time: 18:00-19:00 GMT | 10:00-11:00 PST | 13:00-14:00 EST | 20:00-21:00 Israel

Venue: online

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