Wil Gafney (Brite Divinity School): 30 OT/HB Scholars to Read and Follow

I love the text. I love its richness and complexity. The stories of the Hebrew Bible are the stories that shaped me in my childhood and captured my questioning imagination in divinity school and, these are the texts to which I often turn first for preaching yet, it was the Hebrew language itself that drew me in most deeply, its sounds and shapes and its grammar, unlike any I had encountered before. I particularly love teaching the intro course, helping my students dig deeply into the text, engaging it critically, many for the first time.

In terms of my research, I love the pluripotency of the text, its ability to speak to contexts and cultures across time while maintaining the integrity of its message(s) to its first readers and hearers. I also find studying and teaching the Hebrew Bible in Jewish contexts particularly engaging and enriching.

One of the major trajectories of my scholarship is introducing readers to the complexity of biblical translation and its impact on what one reads in the text and, how one reads and understands the text and thus shapes theology and teaching. One of the major goals of my teaching is that students would be able to bring their whole selves to the task of biblical interpretation, honestly and intentionally, in conversation with the interpreters who came before them who did not identify the ways in which they read and interpreted through their own identity, culture and gender. Most broadly, my aim is to nurture and deepen biblical literacy with regard to contexts of production and canonization as well as content.

The Rev. Dr. Renita J. Weems is the biblical scholar who has had the most impact on me. She has the ability to write well to diverse audiences, churchly and scholarly. Her book Just A Sister Away introduced me and the biblical scholarly world to womanist biblical interpretation in which I saw and heard myself and in which I heard the interpretive practices of my community validated.