Steffan Mathias

Thesis: Paternity, Progeny, and Perpetuation: Creating Lives After Death in the Hebrew Bible

My research projects reassess responses to male childlessness in the Hebrew Bible.  It rereads narrative (Genesis 38, Ruth) legal material (Deuteronomy 25:5-10) and prophetic material (Isaiah 56) to explore how these texts respond to the death of childless men.  Critiquing perspectives which suggest the texts deal with inheritance or widow protection, I will outline how a rereading engaging with Israelite and Judahite perspectives on death and burial, names, and procreation, can offer new perspectives which suggest these texts are dealing with the social continuity of the individual and community.  Drawing on anthropological perspectives, gender-criticism, and Foucauldian theory around discourse, these texts are engaged from both historical and literary perspectives to explore questions of perpetuation, paternity, progeny and gender. 

Research interests:

- Legal material, in particular Leviticus.  Critiques of approaches which attempt to distinguish between moral and ritual legal material and how these are indicitive of certain historical perspectives.

- Feminist-critical, gender-critical, and queer approaches to texts; particularly the anti-social thesis, particuarly in the work of Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani.

- Anthropological and archaeological approaches to biblical studies, and the methodological insights and limits of such approaches. 

- Reception of biblical texts in the context of contemporary Israeli discourse around tombs and holy sites, especially focused on the reception of Rachel through biblical, rabbinic, and other Jewish texts.

- In addition I am employed part-time by Jewish Studies at King's and have particular interest in the relation between Jewish Studies and Biblical Studies.