Bernard M. Levinson is professor of classical and Near Eastern studies and of law at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the Berman Family Chair in Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible. His research focuses on biblical and cuneiform law, textual reinterpretation in the Second Temple period, and the relation of the Bible to Western intellectual history. Most recently, he spent the 2012–13 academic year at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, where he codirected an international research team on a project entitled “Convergence and Divergence in Pentateuchal Theory: Bridging the Academic Cultures of Israel, North America, and Europe.”