Christine Hayes

Christine Hayes is Robert F. and Patricia R. Weis Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judea at Yale University. Hayes’s research interests include Rabbinic and Talmudic Studies, the history and literature of Judaism in late antiquity, Hebrew Bible, and Midrash. Her published work includes several books and numerous articles. In her most recent book, What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 2015), Hayes explores how ancient thinkers grappled with competing conceptions of divine law. What’s Divine 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. In Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford University Press, 2002), she explores the diverse ancient Jewish views about the permeability of the Jewish-Gentile boundary through intermarriage and conversion, and the implications of this diversity for Jewish group identity. Her first book, Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, received the Salo Baron prize in 1997. Hayes serves as an editor of the Encyclopedia for the Bible and its Reception as well as the co-editor of the Association for Jewish Studies Review. Hayes was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her M.A. and her Ph.D. in Talmudic and Judaic Studies. She also holds a B.A. from Harvard University.