University of California, B.A.
University of California, Berkeley, M. A. Ph.D.

Dr. Ziony Zevit, Distinguished Professor of Biblical Literature and Northwest Semitic Languages, joined the faculty of American Jewish University in 1974. Prior to then, he taught at the University of Haifa, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and U.C. Berkeley.

In addition to his graduate studies at U.C. Berkeley, he also attended the Graduate Theological Union, University of Michigan, University of Vienna, and The Hebrew University. He participated in archaeological excavations at Tel Lachish and at Tel Dan.

In 1987, he was designated the first Avraham Biran Fellow in Biblical Archaeology at the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem. He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2003); in 2004, he was awarded the Frank Moore Cross Award by the American Schools of Oriental Research for substantial publications in Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean epigraphy, texts, and traditions.

Dr. Zevit has published studies in almost every major American, European, and Israeli scholarly journal in his fields of interest and his bibliography lists more than 100 publications. In his first book, he studied the development of Hebrew spelling in the biblical period (Matres Lectionis in Ancient Hebrew Epigraphs). This enables scholars to date ancient writings on the basis of how words are spelled. In 1998, he published a second book clarifying problems in the verbal system of classical Hebrew (The Anterior Construction in Classical Hebrew). His research affects the way many biblical narratives are to be understood and interpreted. His most recent book published in 2001 is The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Parallactic Approach, a study of popular and folk religion in ancient Israel on the basis of both biblical and archaeological evidence. This book has now entered its third reprinting.

His current research focuses on how the Israelite religion of the biblical period evolved into proto-Judaism during the Persian and early Greco-Roman periods. Dr. Zevit has recently completed a book entitled, What Really Happened In the Garden of Eden?