Professor Ron Hendel has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since 1999 and has served as chair of Jewish Studies, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Graduate Program in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. Hendel approaches the Hebrew Bible from a variety of angles – history of religions, textual criticism, linguistics, comparative mythology, literature, and cultural memory. He is the author of How Old is the Hebrew Bible?, The Book of Genesis: A Biography, Remembering Abraham, and other books.  He is general editor of The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition.