Peter Machinist - Biography#

Prof. Machinist is the Hancock Research Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard University, serving since 1991 in the Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Harvard Divinity School; he retired from full-time teaching in January, 2017. Earlier, he taught at Case Western Reserve University (1971-77), the University of Arizona/ Tucson (1977-85), and the University of Michigan/Ann Arbor (1985-90); he also was visiting lecturer (1981) and then Lady Davis Visiting Professor in Jewish History (2003) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Visiting Professor at the University of Munich (2013-14), and Visiting Professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Rome (2018). He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1984-85) and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2008-09). The University of Zurich awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2009, and he received a Festschrift in his honor in 2013. He has given invited lectures throughout North America, Europe, Israel, and East Asia, and served on a number of boards of journals and scholarly organizations in his fields. His work lies in the intellectual and cultural history of the ancient Near East, with a focus on Israel and the Hebrew Bible, and Mesopotamia. Among his publications: Letters from Priests to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal (co-edited with Steven Cole; 1998); and more than seventy articles and reviews including “The Voice of the Historian in the Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean World” (2003); "How Gods Die, Biblically and Otherwise. A Problem of Cosmic Restructuring" (2011); "Cities and Ideology: The Case of Assur in the Neo-Assyrian Period" (2016); "Royal Inscriptions in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia: Some Reflections on Presence, Function, and Self-Critique" (2018); "Periodization in Biblical Historiography" (2019); "Reflections on the Epic of Gilgamesh" (2020); and "Manasseh of Judah: A Case Study in Biblical Historiography" (2020).