"King Solomon's Mines Revisited: A Misadventure Story"

With Steven Weitzman, The Daniel E. Koshland Professor of Jewish Culture and Religion at Stanford University

Date: January 21, 2014
Time: noon
Location: University of Arizona Hillel Foundation (1245 E 2nd St)
Suggested parking: 2nd Street Garage, Mountain Ave. & 2nd Street

King Solomon was fabled not just for his wisdom but for his immense wealth, and recently archaeologists have claimed to have uncovered the possible source of that wealth in copper mines found in southern Jordan. This talk will place that discovery within a much longer quest to find the origins of Solomon’s fortune, an adventure (or rather, a misadventure) story that spans more than five centuries and that reveals some unexpected insights into the Bible and the history of its interpretation.

Steven Weitzman is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor of Jewish Culture and Religion at Stanford University.  He is also Director of its Taube Center for Jewish Studies.  A scholar of the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish texts, Dr. Weitzman’s research draws on comparative evidence from ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Roman literature in an effort to rethink the relationship between texts and contexts in the Hebrew Bible and early Judaism.  His first book, Song and Story in Biblical Narrative, was the winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in the Humanities.  He is also the author of Surviving Sacrilege, Solomon: the Lure of Wisdom and The Jews: a History (with John Efron and Matthias Lehmann).