My research centers primarily upon the Old Testament, especially its Greek translation commonly known as the Septuagint. If you are not familiar with the Septuagint, it comes as no surprise to me; classicists and seminary graduates alike often have only a dim conception of just what the Septuagint actually is, and therefore avoid it. Perhaps that is the right instinct, but I hope to help change the scenario in some small way, helping to familiarize Septuagint studies for biblical scholars and the odd passerby from neighboring disciplines. The Septuagint is an incredible (and incredibly ignored) part of understanding post-Classical (Koine) Greek, social and religious aspects of ancient Jewish life and culture in the Greco-Roman world, and the development of early Christianity, among others. I have a separate page devoted to introducing Septuagint studies, if you care to dive in a bit further. I’ve also coauthored a basic introduction to the Septuagint that you might find helpful. For the more advanced, you might be interested in the Septuagint reader’s edition that I produced with my colleague Greg Lanier, or the disciplinary handbook for Septuagint research that I co-edited.

Of course, the Septuagint would not exist without the Hebrew Bible, and so one of my primary academic loves (and the focus of the occasional side-project) lies there. While the Septuagint requires study as a text in its own right for many reasons (which drive the bulk of my research projects), it also deserves attention as one of the earliest witnesses to the Hebrew OT. There is a significant need for greater familiarity with the complexities involved in Septuagint studies in order to understand what it says and how, the Jewish people who produced it, and the Hebrew text that precipitated it.

Most of the biblical scholarship I do involves a good deal of work in linguistics. My first monograph was focused on Septuagint lexicography, an area I continue to work in (for both Hebrew and Greek). I have also focused parts of my research in Cognitive Linguistics, with a volume on its position among other linguistic theories and another on its application to the semantics of Greek prepositions.