Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., “The Jewish Study Bible” (Oxford UP, 2014)

At 2,300 pages and featuring 54 contributors and 42 contextual and interpretive essays, the second edition of The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2014) represents a monumental scholarly achievement. In my conversation with coeditor Marc Zvi Brettler, he talks about the complexity of that undertaking and the foundations upon which it was built. Marc Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Chair of Judaic Studies at Duke University’s Center for Jewish Studies. From 1986 to 2015, he taught Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and since 2001 was the Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies. His academic research has been wide ranging. He has explored the use of religious metaphors in the Hebrew Bible (God Is King: Understanding an Israelite Metaphor, 1989), the nature of biblical historical texts as “literary” texts (The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, 1995), and gender and the Bible. He was a co-editor of The Jewish Annotated New Testament (2011) and The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2001 and 2010), the co-author of The Bible and the Believer (2012), the author of Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Hebrew (2002) and the co-editor of first edition of The Jewish Study Bible (2004), which was awarded a National Jewish Book Award. His book How to Read the Bible (2005) was published by the Jewish Publication Society and in paperback as How to Read the Jewish Bible (2007) by Oxford University Press. In addition to his published work, Brettler was awarded the Michael L. Walzer Award for Excellence in Teaching.