Christopher Rollston

Among the foci of Professor Rollston's research are: Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), religion in the ancient Near East (especially ancient Israel), law and diplomacy in the ancient Near East, Northwest Semitic epigraphy, literacy in the ancient world, ancient writing practices, scribal education, origins and early use of the alphabet, ancient and modern epigraphic forgeries, inscribed ossuaries (“bone boxes”), personal names, prosopography, ancient wisdom literature, prophecy in the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean context, Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek New Testament, and Early Christianity.

Professor Rollston earned an M.A. (1996) and Ph.D. (1999) at The Johns Hopkins University (Department of Near Eastern Studies) in ancient Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Rollston works in more than a dozen ancient and modern languages, including various ancient Semitic languages (e.g., Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, Palmyrene, Nabataean, Ammonite, Moabite, Edomite, Ugaritic, Akkadian), several ancient and modern Indo-European languages (e.g., Hellenistic Greek, Classical Latin; Modern German, French, Spanish, and Italian), as well as Sahidic Coptic.

Professor Rollston was a full-time faculty member in the Dept. of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University for two years (as a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Northwest Semitic), where students consistently noted his strong teaching abilities. For around a decade he held the Toyozo Nakarai Professorship of Old Testament and Semitic languages at Emmanuel School of Religion, where he was a popular teacher and mentor, resigning that position in 2012.  During the spring semester of 2013, Rollston was the Visiting Professor of Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. During the fall semester of 2013, he was a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Scholar at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (Jerusalem), and during the spring semester of 2014, he was a Visiting Professor of Northwest Semitic Literature at Tel Aviv University.  About a decade prior to this, during the spring and summer of 2002, Rollston was a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Scholar at the American Society of Overseas Research (Amman).  Rollston has excavated in Syria (Umm el-Marra) and in Israel (Megiddo), and he has conducted research at museums and departments of antiquity in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Syria, as well as various museums in North America and Europe.