Ph.D. Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, 1975.
Areas of specialization
Levenson is a scholar of the Bible and of the rabbinic midrash, with an interest in the philosophical and theological issues involved in biblical studies. He studies the relationship between traditional modes of Biblical interpretation and modern historical criticism. He also studies the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Levenson's foci include: Theological traditions in ancient Israel ; Literary Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible; Midrash; History of Jewish biblical interpretation; Modern Jewish theology; Jewish-Christian relations His 1987 essay, Why Jews Are Not Interested in Biblical Theology essay, challenged the fields of historical criticism and Biblical theology as they had been practiced and has been widely discussed. Levenson has been called, “the most interesting and incisive biblical exegete among contemporary Jewish thinkers.” He is described as “challenging the idea, part of Greek philosophy and popular now, that resurrection for Jews and the followers of Jesus is simply the survival of an individual's soul in the hereafter.” In Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel, Levenson asserts that in classical Christianity and Judaism,” “resurrection occurs for the whole person — body and soul. For early Christians and some Jews, resurrection meant being given back one's body or possibly God creating a new similar body after death”. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Jewish Review of Books. In the late 1990s his body of work as of that time was reviewed by Marvin A. Sweeney and put in the larger context of the field of biblical theology; Sweeney wrote: "A great deal of his work focuses on the seminal question of identifying the role that Christian theological constructs have played in the reading of biblical literature, even when the reading is presented as historically based objective scholarship, and of developing reading strategies that can remove these constructs in order to let the biblical texts 'speak for themselves.' Work of this kind naturally paves the way for the development of Jewish biblical theology."
Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible in the Divinity School and in the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities, the University of Chicago, 1986–88
Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible in the Divinity School, the University of Chicago, 1982–86
Assistant Professor of Religion and Biblical Studies, Wellesley College, 1975–82
