Dennis G. Pardee
Areas of Study: Department of Middle Eastern Studies Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Teaching Since 1972 Contact: Email Interests:
Linguistics, Literary Studies, Philology, Religious Studies
Pardee teaches Biblical Hebrew as well as courses on the inscriptions in pre–exilic Hebrew and in related languages. His principal research is on Ugaritic, the language of the people of Ugarit, an ancient Syrian city north of Israel. It was a culture in which the mythological Baal was an important divinity, though later he did not fit into the monotheistic Yahwism of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.
Passages from the Hebrew Bible form the basis for Pardee’s Intermediate Hebrew classes. The three–quarter sequence begins with prose verses, such as portion of the creation story that begins Genesis. The second quarter consists of reading poetry, primarily the Psalms, and the third includes reading manuscripts, including biblical texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.