Douglas A. Knight

Drucilla Moore Buffington Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Bible and Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies

Douglas A. Knight is an expert on Hebrew Bible and the culture of ancient Jewry. Drawing especially on sociohistorical approaches and ideological criticism, he focuses within Hebrew Bible studies on the social and political world of the first millennium BCE: the legal Jewish traditions, historical and prophetic literature, ethics, and the history of biblical interpretation. He has been active in the Society of Biblical Literature and is co-founder and steering committee member of the Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives (ETANA). He has received major awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. At Vanderbilt University he has served as acting dean of the Divinity School and was for five years the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture. His lecturing has taken him across the United States and to Germany, Norway, Denmark, Hungary, Israel, Japan, and China. The author and editor of numerous books and articles, he currently serves as general editor of the series “Library of Ancient Israel.” At present he is completing a book entitled Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel (Westminster, John Knox Press) and is working on a commentary on the book of Joshua for the New Cambridge Bible Commentary series (Cambridge University Press).

Professor Knight’s teaching interests include Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, Hebrew Bible, and detailed courses on the figure of Abraham, Hebrew Prophets, Law and Justice in Ancient Israel, Ethics in the Hebrew Bible, and many other topics.

Prof. Knight retired from Vanderbilt in 2015.