Marc Zvi Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Distinguished Professor in Judaic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and a core faculty member of the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University. A leading scholar of biblical studies, he is a member of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has served on the Council of the Society of Biblical Literature, and is the co-founder of TheTorah.com, one of the most widely read platforms for academic biblical scholarship.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, Brettler earned his B.A., M.A, and Ph.D. from Brandeis University, where he studied under Nahum Sarna; he also studied for two years as a visiting graduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before teaching at Duke, he taught at Middlebury College, Wellesley College, Yale University, Brown University, Brandeis University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At Brandeis, he was the Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies, where he served as Chair of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.
Brettler has authored and edited numerous influential works that have shaped contemporary biblical scholarship and have made the Bible more accessible to general audiences. He is co-editor, with Adele Berlin, of The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2004; second revised edition 2014), which won a National Jewish Book Award and was praised as “a masterpiece” by the Times Literary Supplement. His book How to Read the Bible (Jewish Publication Society, 2005), which has been called “an eye-opening journey through a familiar text, a fresh look at an old story,” was awarded Best Book in Judaism by the Best Books 2006 Awards and later reissued in paperback by Oxford University Press as How to Read the Jewish Bible.
He is co-editor with Amy-Jill Levine of The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford University Press), the first work of its kind, which received national attention including coverage in The New York Times. A third edition is forthcoming, and in 2019, Brettler and Levine presented the book to Pope Francis. Together, they also co-authored The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (HarperOne), and Brettler is a co-author of The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously (Oxford University Press). His other books include Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Israeli Hebrew (Yale University Press), The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, and Reading the Book of Judges (both published by Routledge).
Brettler served as an associate editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible and contributed to all ten volumes of My People's Prayer Book, a commentary on the siddur that won a National Jewish Book Award in 2008. He also wrote the section “Our Biblical Heritage” in My People’s Passover Haggadah and contributed the essay “Introduction to the Torah” in Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel, and Quran, edited by Brian Arthur Brown, which won an Independent Publisher Book Award for religion in 2014. Several of his books have been translated into Hebrew, German, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese. He has also written scholarly and popular articles on metaphor and the Bible, the Bible as history, gender and the Bible, Jewish-Christian relations, and other topics. In 2017, he was selected as one of 100 scholars for the “American Values Religious Voices” project, and he has written opinion pieces concerning the role of the Bible in public education.
Brettler has written for The Forward and The Jerusalem Report, and has appeared on the television series Mysteries of the Bible, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He is a frequent guest on popular podcasts including “The Bible for Normal People,” and “The Buried Bible.” Brettler has received the Michael A. Walzer Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Keter Torah Award from the Boston Bureau of Jewish Education, and the Upstander Prize from Queens University in Charlotte; he has served as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. An advocate for innovative teaching, Brettler has taught in adult Jewish learning programs such as the Wexner Heritage Program and Boston’s Me’ah initiative. He has lectured widely and serves as a frequent scholar-in-residence.
He is currently collaborating with Professor Edward Breuer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on a project exploring the Jewish reception of historical-critical biblical studies.
Brettler’s activities as a scholar of Jewish Studies have led him to some unexpected undertakings: In addition to meeting the Pope, he taught courses on Jewish Studies for refuseniks in the former USSR (where he was interrogated by the KGB), has taught Bible in China and Japan, has served as an expert witness on a first-degree murder trial that had a Jewish angle, and has written card #1, featuring Sandy Koufax—a childhood hero from Brooklyn—in the Jewish Major Leaguers baseball card set.