Brian B. Schmidt

Research interests:

Religion and Culture in Late Bronze to Iron Age West Semitic Societies, Magic and Ritual, Death and Afterlife, the Iconic and the Aniconic, Ritual Violence and Human Sacrifice, Inscribed Literacy and Literary Production in Early Israel.

Brian’s research, university teaching and educational outreach have for more than three decades has bridged the fields of ancient Near Eastern history, culture and religion, the northwest Semitic languages and literatures, and biblical studies (Hebrew Bible). He is a social historian of those Late Bronze to Iron Age West Asian religions and cultures located on the eastern Mediterranean littoral. Brian has published extensively on the topics of ancient magic, religion, and ritual; death, demons, and the afterlife; and more recently, ancient literacy, literary production, and the transfer of knowledge. This constellation of intellectual domains and technical expertise is expressive of his career-long commitment to an integrated methodological approach that interfaces archaeological data, epigraphic materials, and the 'critical' (= academic) study of the biblical text.

Brian’s initial forays into exploring ancient social realities centered on Israelite mortuary rituals. In Israel’s Beneficent Dead: Ancestor Cult and Necromancy in Ancient Israelite Religion and Tradition (1994, rev.1996), he proposed that such rites served not only to assure the heirs of their imminent succession, but they secured the predecessor's enduring legacy, and even his immortality in the minds of the living through their multigenerational acts of commemoration. 

The goal of such an approach is to recreate substantive images of the socio-historical realities of ancient Israel and its neighbors. Brian has continued to refine this general approach in his published articles and contributions as well as in his edited and authored volumes including Kuntillet ‘Ajrud: Iron Age Inscriptions and Iconography. MAARAV 20 (2015), Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings (2015), The Materiality of Power: Explorations in ​the Social History of ​Early Israelite Magic (2016) and his forthcoming Writing Sacred: Inscribed Literacies and Literary Production in Ancient Israel and Its World (Oxford University Press).

Research awards:

In support of his research efforts, Brian has been awarded The National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, The Michigan Humanities Award - Fellowship, Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities Fellowship, and the University of Sydney’s Mandelbaum Scholar-in-Residence Award where he also delivered the annual Alan Crown Memorial Lecture. He has also served as visiting research fellow at the American Overseas Research Centers in Ammon (ACOR), Istanbul (ARIT), Jerusalem (AIAR), Nicosia (CAARI), and at the French Institute for Arabic Studies in Damascus. The American Philosophical Society, The Council of American Overseas Research Centers, The American Academy of Religion, The Society of Biblical Literature, The American Council of Learned Societies, The Catholic Biblical Association, and The Hadassah Brandeis Institute have each awarded Brian research an travel grants to present his research at international conferences, for archaeological field work in Israel (Tel Miqne-Ekron) and Syria (Ras Shamra-Ugarit), or to undertake epigraphic research in the national museum archives of Syria (Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia), Turkey (Istanbul), Jordan (Ammon), Israel (Jerusalem), Cyprus (Nicosia) and France (Musée du Louvre, Paris).

Current projects:

Brian is currently completing a monograph on inscribed literacy and literary production titled, Writing Sacred. Brian recently completed an exhaustive treatment of 1 Samuel 28’s ‘witch’ of Endor account for the 2022 Dennis Pardee volume proposing not only the presumed appearance of Samuel’s ghost (or ‘ôb), but also that of various other “divine beings” or gods (‘ēlōhîm), a comprehensive essay on “Death and Afterlife” for the Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship (2020), and several entries in the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception: “Molekh”(2021), “Monsters” (2021), “Morning Star” (2021), “Magic” (2019), and “Marzeah” (2019). Brian has a second volume in progress, I am Mesha, King of Moab, on one of the most important epigraphic discoveries from the Holy Land - the Mesha Stela which was discovered in 1868 in Jordan (ancient Moab) but is housed in the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Professional editorial service:

In addition to serving on various publication projects as a volunteer series editor or guest editor for the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Society of Biblical Literature, Sheffield Academic Press, and E. J. Brill Publishers, Brian has published three books as volume editor and contributor: Contextualizing Israel's Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production (which was nominated for the American Schools of Oriental Research annual book award), Kuntillet 'Ajrud: Iron Age Inscriptions and Iconography, and one of the Society of Biblical Literature’s best-selling publications, The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel (and co-published by E. J. Brill). In 2015, Brian was appointed by the Society of Biblical Literature's Research and Publication Committee to serve as the volunteer General Editor for the Archaeology and Biblical Studies series (or ABS) for which he formed its first eight-member Editorial Board. To date, the ABS series has published eleven volumes in seven years with two more in production and several others in progress. He also served for several years on the Editorial Board of the peer reviewed Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions.

Instructional competences:

Ancient Israelite and Levantine History, Culture and Religion, The Hebrew Bible, Classical Hebrew, Biblical and Early Aramaic.

Through the Department of Middle East Studies (MES), and in cooperation with Michigan's program units in Judaic Studies, Religion, and History as well as the College of LSA's First Year Seminar Program, Brian has regularly offered topical courses and ancient language instruction on a semester-by-semester basis to both undergraduate and graduate students. In 2014, he was nominated for the University of Michigan’s Golden Apple Teaching Award. He has also advised eleven B.A. Honors theses and has served as lead instructor and adviser for the MES graduate program in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel (HBAI). With the collaboration of fellow faculty in MES and across the University on the instructional and advisory components of the graduate program, MES has awarded twenty M.A. degrees and fourteen Ph.D. degrees in HBAI.

For additional information, see Brian’s linked-in curriculum vitae.