Christine Hayes

Christine Hayes is Sterling Professor of Religious Studies 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.

Professor 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 Book Award from the Association for 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 studies) 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 (2011) and Introduction to the Bible (2012). Edited works include Jewish Law and its Interaction with Other Legal Systems (2014), The 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).

Professor 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 four 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, Professor Hayes offered undergraduate courses on the literature and history of the biblical and talmudic periods (including “Introduction to the Bible,” which can be viewed online, as well as advanced text courses and graduate-only seminars. In 2005 she 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. She has recently served the university on the Committee on Yale College Education and the Committee on Majors, as well as serving as chair of the Department of Religious Studies (2011–2015) and director of graduate studies in the Department of Religious Studies (current).