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Prof. Joshua Berman - bio

Rabbi Prof. Joshua Berman is a professor of Tanakh at Bar-Ilan University.  Inspired by Rabbi Sacks' Radical Then, Radical Now, Rabbi Prof. Berman wrote Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford , 2008) which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist in Scholarship.  One of the hallmarks of Rabbi Sacks' work was the understanding that truths that seem obvious today, were not so in previous generations, and only by recovering pre-modern ways of thought, can we properly understand the lessons the ancient texts are teaching us.  Prof. Berman has followed this lead, particularly in his work, Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism (Oxford, 2017).  He is currently working on a book, Without Apology, Without Forgiveness: The Restoration of Relationships in the Hebrew Bible.