Steven Fraade
Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism
Yale University
Until his retirement in 2022, Steven Fraade taught at Yale University for forty-three years courses on rabbinic literature, the history of Second Temple and early rabbinic Judaism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He regularly offered seminars on midrashic, mishnaic, and talmudic texts, and topics in ancient Jewish history. His research interests include the history of Judaism (in its varieties) in Second Temple and early rabbinic times; biblical translation and exegesis in ancient Judaism and Christianity; the history and rhetoric of ancient Jewish law; the Dead Sea Scrolls; literary-rhetorical analysis of tannaitic and amoraic rabbinic texts; attitudes towards ascetic piety in early Judaism; and multilingualism in ancient Jewish culture.
He is the author of Enosh and His Generation: Pre-Israelite Hero and History in Postbiblical Interpretation (1984) and From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and Its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (1991). The latter volume won the 1992 National Jewish Book Award for the Best Book of Jewish Scholarship. Steven Fraade is co-editor of Rabbinic Perspectives: Rabbinic Literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls (2006). More recently, he published Legal Fictions: Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages (2011), as well as a new annotated translation of and commentary on the Damascus Document for Oxford University Press as part of the Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls (2021). Most recently, he has authored Multilingualism and Translation in Ancient Judaism: Before and After Babel, in production at Cambridge University Press (expected 2023 publication).
He earned the degree of A.B. from Brown University (1970) and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1980). Steven Fraade was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in1988. During 1988–89 and in 1993 and 2015 he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. He was Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University in 2015. He is also the recipient of research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. He has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and an honorary member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language (Jerusalem). He is a former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Yale and previously served as its director of graduate studies and director of undergraduate studies. For nine years he chaired the university’s Language Study Committee and for eleven years chaired its Program in Judaic Studies.
Selected Publications
Enosh and His Generation: Pre-Israelite Hero and History in Post-Biblical Interpretation. Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 30. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984.
From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy. Jewish Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion Series. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.
Rabbinic Perspectives: Rabbinic Literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 7-9 January, 2003. Edited by Steven D. Fraade, Aharon Shemesh, and Ruth A. Clements. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 62. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 147. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
The Faces of Torah: Studies in the Texts and Contexts of Ancient Judaism in Honor of Steven Fraade. Edited by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Tzvi Novick, and Christine Hayes. Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 22. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2017.
Forthcoming: The Damascus Document. The Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.