30 ACUMEN • SPRING 2025 Ben Wright has focused his decades of assiduous scholarship on an eventful and sometimes obscure segment of Jewish history known as the Second Temple period (c. 300 BCE–70 CE). It is a slice of the past shrouded by both time and the strange provenances of the many documents historians rely on in their work, understanding, and reconstructing to the degree possible, what has come before us. A leading expert in the field, Wright has a gift for opening the curtains on history in a way that illuminates the richness and complexity of the issues of the moment, and the way the lives of those who lived in these societies differ from— and in some surprising ways resemble—our own. Wright, University Distinguished Professor at Lehigh and professor of religion, culture, and society will retire at the end of 2025, and he has organized a valedictory conference titled “Studying Early Judaism in the 21st Century,” set for March 24-26 at Lehigh. “It seemed like a good time to take stock of what we have done in the first quarter of this century,” he says The conference is being organized in conjunction with the Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. “I’ve been involved in the Berman Center since I came to Lehigh in 1990, and I’m delighted to be a part of this 40th anniversary year,” Wright says. “It’s a big milestone for the program, and I’m really looking forward to the conference. The lineup of people coming in and presenting is really impressive.” Over the course of Wright’s illustrious, four-decade career, he has written or edited seven books, published more than 200 scholarly papers and articles, and won awards and recognitions too numerous to list here. His work on the Second Temple period—a time which ends with the siege of Jerusalem by the Roman general Titus—was also the period of the development of the Hebrew Bible. “There are no collections of texts at that time that all ancient Jews agreed upon which would be the equivalent of the Bible,” says Wright. “People had texts that they thought were really important, some of which ended up in the Jewish Bible, but others didn’t.” It was also a tremendously dynamic era, an era in which, Wright explains, Jews could and did explore and express a wide variety of ideas. “This is a very fertile period of thought. Jews lived across the ancient Mediterranean and all the way to the East, and Roman Jews were as different from Alexandrian Jews or Jerusalem Jews as Lithuanian Jews might be from South Jersey Jews today.” Unveiling the Past: A Scholar’s Legacy in the Study of Early Judaism CHRIS QUIRK As Ben Wright approaches retirement, the renowned scholar celebrates a career unraveling the mysteries of the Second Temple period and advancing fresh perspectives in early Judaism studies
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