Jeffrey H. Tigay

Jeffrey Tigay is Emeritus A. M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1971 to 2010. He received his B.A. in ancient history from Columbia, master of Hebrew literature and rabbinical ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. in comparative biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies from Yale. His specialty is the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation, particularly in its original ancient Near Eastern context. His prior publications include The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (1982), Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (1985), You Shall Have No Other Gods: Israelite Religion in the Light of Hebrew Inscriptions (1986), The Jewish Publication Society Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy (1996; revised and expanded Hebrew edition, 2016), and the commentary on Exodus in Oxford's Jewish Study Bible (2003; second, revised edition, 2014), as well as articles in Encyclopedia Mikra'it and Encyclopaedia Judaica. He is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem and of the Annenberg Institute (now the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies) at the University of Pennsylvania and a recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the coeditor, with Adele Berlin, of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 1: Ancient Israel from Its Beginnings through 332 BCE.