AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE

I was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1941. My mother is from there and my father is from Mosul, Iraq. When I was six years old, my family moved to Beirut, but we then emigrated to America. I landed in New York harbor in 1955 and was naturalized in 1961. My career began a year later, upon my graduation from Brooklyn College with a major in history.

In 1962, I began graduate studies at Brandeis University and pursued Ancient Near Eastern as well as Islamic studies. I wrote a dissertation on a topic which depended most on Assyriological training and graduated from Brandeis in 1966. I accepted a position in the Department of Religion at the University of North Carolina the same year. I have risen in the ranks, becoming full professor in 1977 and William R. Kenan, Jr Professor of Religious Studies in 1991. I chaired the Department from 1988 to 1993. In the summer of 1999, I accepted the Mary Jane Werthan chair of Judaic and Biblical Studies at Vanderbilt University and directed Vanderbilt’s Program in Jewish Studies from 2002 to 2005. I have held numerous posts, elected and nominated, at universities and at professional societies, foremost among which is the American Oriental Society. I was elected President of the Society of Biblical Literature (Southeast branch, 1986), of the American Oriental Society (1996), and of the International Association for Assyriology (2005).

I have belonged to a number of editorial boards for learned journals (most recently the Biblical Archaeologist, Mesopotamian Studies, Mari: Annales de recherches interdisciplinaires, Shofar, Estudios de Asia y Africa), and for major reference tools (such as The Anchor Bible Dictionary and Mesopotamian Civilizations). I have edited the "Bible and Ancient Near East" pages of the Journal of the American Oriental Society from 1976 to 1984 and I am doing it once more since 1996. I am past editor of E. J. Brill's Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui, a publication founded by William F. Albright and the chief editor of Scribner's Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, a 4-volume reference set that appeared in 1995 and that has received many awards since then. I have lectured widely, including most recently as a Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne and as a Distinguished Scholar at Ben-Gurion and Brigham Young universities, and have delivered a number of named lectures at diverse universities.

My scholarly efforts have clustered around two disciplines: Assyriology, specializing on the archives found at the Middle Euphrates town of Mari, and Hebrew Scripture, heretofore specializing on its briefer narratives. In 1979 I conducted a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for college Teachers on "Folklore Studies and the Ancient Near Eastern Narrative," to explore how folklore analysis may permit better understanding of documents without authors or social contexts. I held a similar forum for College teachers in 1996 on "The Hebrew Bible in Cultural Contexts."

I have published a commentary to the book of Ruth in 1979 (it is now in second edition) which brought me, inn 1982-83, an invitation to Jerusalem's Institute for Advanced Studies where an international group of scholars discussed how the Bible works as literature. In 1991 appeared my Anchor Bible commentary to the book of Jonah. I continue to comments on the Mari archives and write on biblical topics; but I am currently most occupied in preparing a commentary on the Book of Judges for the Anchor Bible series.

Jack M. Sasson
Werthan Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies
Vanderbilt University