Christine Hayes

Sterling Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies

203-432-0834

20 York St, New Haven, CT 06511

Fields of interest :

Early Mediterranean and West Asian Religions, Jewish Studies

Christine Hayes is Sterling Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus in Classical Judaica. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, she was Assistant Professor of Hebrew Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University for three years. Her published works include several books and many articles in Vetus Testamentum, The Journal for the Study of Judaism, The Harvard Theological Review, and various scholarly anthologies.

Hayes’s most recent book, What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives, received the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship, a 2016 PROSE award for best book in Theology and Religious Studies from the American Publishers Association, and the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Award from the Association of Jewish Studies. Her other scholarly monographs are Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (recipient of the 1997 Salo Baron prize for a first book in Jewish thought and literature) and Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (a 2003 National Jewish Book Award finalist). She has authored two introductory volumes (The Emergence of Judaism [2010] and Introduction to the Bible [2012]). Edited works include Jewish Law and its Interactions with other Legal Systems (2014), Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law (2017), Classic Essays in Early Rabbinic Culture and History (2018) and The Literature of the Sages: A Re-visioning (2022).

Hayes is active in professional and academic organizations, serving for many years as an editor of the Encyclopedia for the Bible and its Reception (EBR), for 4 years as co-editor of the Association for Jewish Studies Review, and for two years as president of the Association for Jewish Studies. She is currently a senior faculty fellow with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.

At Yale, Hayes offers undergraduate courses on the literature and history of the biblical and talmudic periods (including “Introduction to the Bible” which can be viewed on line at http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145) as well as advanced text courses and graduate-only seminars. In 2005, Hayes was awarded the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities. She has served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Religious Studies as well as for the Program in Judaic Studies. Recent university service includes the Committee on Yale College Education and the Committee on Majors, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies (2011-2015) and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religious Studies (current).