Benjamin Sommer (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Benjamin D. Sommer is a professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Previously he was the director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, where he taught from 1994–2008. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Hebrew University, the Shalom Hartman Institute, the University of Chicago, and Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University, and a fellow of the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization at the New York University Law School, the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, the Yad Hanadiv Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. 

Sommer’s book, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (Yale University Press, 2015), was selected as a recommended book in religion by Publishers Weekly, which described it as a “groundbreaking work … clearly written and broad in application.” The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz described the book as “a synthesis of intellectual acuity, clarity, deep knowledge of classical Jewish texts throughout the generations along with contemporary Christian theology and ancient Near Eastern literature.” Revelation and Authority received the Goldstein-Goren Prize in Jewish Thought from Ben Gurion University for the triennial term of 2014–16 and was named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for 2015 and the Association for Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Prize in Jewish thought and philosophy for 2014–16. The book traces an approach to revelation found among modern Jewish thinkers such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Louis Jacobs, and Franz Rosenzweig back to biblical texts themselves, thus noting manifold and surprising connections between ideas of revelation in the Bible and in modern theology. A Hebrew edition of this book was published by Carmel Press.

Sommer’s earlier book, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2009), received the Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in 2010 from the American Academy of Religion as well as the Jordan Schnitzer Award from the Association for Jewish Studies for books published from 2006–09. The book addresses perceptions of divine embodiment in ancient Israel, Canaan, and Assyria, and how these perceptions reappear in later Jewish philosophy and mysticism. The AJS Prize Committee described Sommer’s book as “an original, wide-ranging and accessible work of scholarship … a cross-cultural tour de force” and wrote that his “thesis has implications for understanding not only the theology of ancient Israel but also the theologies of its surrounding world, whether in Mesopotamia or the Levant, as well as those of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.” (The AAR jury also used the phrase “tour de force” to describe the book.) His first book, A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40–66 (Stanford University Press, 1998), was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize by the American Academy of Jewish Research in 1998.

Selected Publications

• Sommer, Benjamin. “Revelation – Mattan Torah.” The St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, August 11, 2025.
• Sommer, Benjamin. “Reception as Revelation: Correlational Theology in Jewish Tradition and Scripture.” In Do We Still Need Inspiration? Scriptures and Theology, edited by Matthieu Richelle, Martinus Beukenhorst, and Camilla Recalcati, 101–44. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—Tension, Transmission, Transformation. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.
• Sommer, Benjamin. “Prosody and Preaching: Poetic Form and Religious Function in Biblical Verse.” In A New Song: Biblical Hebrew Poetry as Jewish and Christian Scripture, edited by Stephen D. Campbell, Richard G. Rohlfing, and Richard S. Briggs, 106–41. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023.
• Sommer, Benjamin. “Tradition and Change in Priestly Law: On the Internal Coherence of the Priestly Worldview,” In The Pentateuch and Its Readers: Essays in Honor of Baruch Schwartz, edited by Joel Baden and Jeffrey Stackert, 269–84. Forschungen zum Alten Testament. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2023.
• Sommer, Benjamin. “Yehezkel Kaufmann and Recent Approaches to Monotheism,” In Yehezkel Kaufmann and the Reinvention of Jewish Exegesis of the Bible, edited by Thomas Staubli, Benjamin D. Sommer and Job Jindo, 204–39. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis. Freiburg and Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Freiburg and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017.
• Sommer, Benjamin. “Nature, Revelation and Grace in Psalm 19: Towards a Theological Reading of Scripture,” The Harvard Theological Review 108, no. 3 (2015): 376–401.