under contract with Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library

Biblical literature is filled with math, but it is easy to miss. When we look for math, we tend to look for treatises, proofs, or exercises, things like Euclid’s Elements or Babylonian word problems. But most math is not found in these forms; most math is, as classicist Serafina Cuomo has called it, “background noise.” It is so integrated into everyday life that it disappears from view, and we cannot study that which we do not see. In this project, I will bring to the distinct, but related issues of numerate education and mathematical thought in ancient Israelite and early Jewish contexts to the foreground. I will investigate what numerate education looked like in ancient Israel, and why it is that so many biblical and early Jewish literary texts teem with numbers and calculations. 

This project challenges the prevailing assumption among scholars that ancient Israelite and Jewish scribes were either uninterested in or worse, incapable of mathematical thought. On the contrary, I will show that ancient Israelite and early Jewish scribes were immersed in the broader Near Eastern and Mediterranean networks of knowledge and mathematical cultures, and that this had a direct impact on the development of both theologies and literary styles found in many biblical texts. I will argue that Israelite and early Jewish scribes made use of numbers and calculation to shape literary worlds after their own lived experiences, drawing together the worlds of scriptural production and scribal administration.