Eric Jarrard is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Wellesley College.
He holds a doctorate in Hebrew Bible from Harvard University, an MTS from Emory University, and BA in Religious Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been at Wellesley College since 2020 where he was previously the Elisabeth Luce Moore Postdoctoral Fellow of Biblical Studies.
His work employs critical theory to investigate how communities assign and negotiate meanings to the textual life cycles of the Hebrew Bible beginning with its ancient Near Eastern context and focusing specifically on late antiquity (c. 500 BCE – 200 CE) and contemporary American culture. His research has been published in Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, Vetus Testamentum, Biblical Interpretation, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. He lives in Central Massachusetts with his family.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
sea & sinai
My current project, The Exodus and Law in Monuments and Memory, enlists postcolonial theory to establish the ancient Near Eastern monumental antecedents behind the correlation of biblical history writing and law. By examining the persistent interlinking between the sea and Sinai events in the Hebrew Bible, the project considers how non-legal texts through the second century CE adopt monumental characteristics of ancient Near Eastern empires to articulate a collective identity for biblical writers. I argue that the biblical juxtaposition of legal corpora and the exodus imagery models itself after the apposition of monumental iconography and textual inscriptions found throughout the region, and especially in ancient Near Eastern stelae.
Understanding the intrinsic association of monumentality and social remembering exposes the elasticity and malleability of time, history telling, and identity formation not only throughout the ancient world, but also including contemporary debates concerning public monuments like confederate statues.
You can see me present on topics related to this project or contact me for additional information.
popular culture
I also address the resonances of biblical themes within contemporary popular culture using a wide range of theoretical models. Examples of my approaches include the use of horror theory to discuss the externalization of social anxieties as monsters in Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the book of Daniel, and an investigation of kingship and narrative in the former prophets and Game of Thrones. My work also examines how trends in contemporary popular culture are able to inform more aptly our understanding of biblical literature, including the contrast of orthodox and heterodox wisdom in the Broadway musical Hamilton, or the notion of biblical and sit-com predictability in NBC’s The Good Place.
On the topic of the Bible and popular culture, I have a monograph, The Bible and Hip Hop, under contract with Lexington/Fortress Press (2021), chapters in Theology and Game of Thrones, the Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters, The Routledge Handbook of the Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry, and I have been published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin.
