Jacob L. Wright
Trained in Germany, Jacob Wright is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University. Author of many prize-winning books, his latest was on The New Yorker’s Best of 2023 and Publishers Weekly best five books in religion for 2023. His areas of expertise include the formation of biblical literature, the archaeology and history of ancient Israel, and the impact of the Bible on our political self-understandings.
Presenter at
Spring Bible & Archaeology Fest 2025, April 5-6, 2025
The Bible as a Response to Collective Trauma
This is not your typical lecture about the Bible: who wrote it, when, where, and how. These questions will be addressed. But the central question is why the Bible exists at all.
The collapse of ancient Israel wasn’t the end of its story; it was the beginning of the Bible. As Israel struggled to maintain a national identity without a kingdom, its people turned to storytelling, law codes, and historical narratives to define who they were.
The central thesis is: the Bible didn’t emerge from power or in an golden age, but in the aftermath of defeat and collective trauma.
For history enthusiasts, Jews and Christians, and the non-religious, Wright’s talk reveals how defeat, exile, and the loss of a kingdom led to the creation of one of the world’s most influential texts. For scholars and Bible readers, the lecture digs into the historical and archaeological record to uncover how books how the Biblical narrative that begins with Genesis was crafted—not just as history, but as a blueprint for survival. One will learn about how a broken nation wrote itself into existence—and changed the world in the process.
