Faculty Research Area:
Biblical Studies: Old Testament & Hebrew Bible.
Research Interests:
Hebrew Bible, Psalms, Ancient Hebrew, Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, Ugaritic.
Current Projects:
Psalms 101–150. The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition. SBL Press.
Reading Psalms with the Scribes. Oxford University Press. Under contract.
Courses Taught:
Introduction to the Old Testament, Elementary Biblical Hebrew, Advanced Old Testament Hebrew, Esther, Ugaritic Grammar and Texts.
Biography:
John Screnock (PhD, Toronto) is Tutorial Fellow in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Wycliffe Hall. From 2018–2021 he was Research Fellow in Hebrew Bible at Oxford, and from 2015–2018 he was Kennicott Fellow in Hebrew at Oxford. His research interests include the Hebrew Bible, the Psalms, Dead Sea scrolls, Hebrew linguistics, and textual criticism. He is the author of Traductor Scriptor: The Old Greek Translation of Exodus 1–14 as Scribal Activity (Brill, 2017), and articles in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vetus Testamentum, Biblica, Journal of Semitic Studies, Hebrew Studies, Textus, Revue de Qumran, and Dead Sea Discoveries. John's current project, Reading Psalms with the Scribes (OUP), examines scribal activity in the textual witnesses to Psalms for insights into the composition, poetics, and interpretation of psalms.
Recent Publications:
2025. Psalms 90–100. The Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Bible. Baylor University Press.
2024. “The Art of Repetition in Ancient Hebrew Literature: Command-Execution Pairing in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Beyond.” HeBAI 13.
2024. "The Textual History and Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible." In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Oxford University Press.
2024. “Translation Technique and Reconstructed Hebrew Vorlagen in the Greek Text of Psalm 4.” JSCS 57.
2022. John Screnock with Vladimir Olivero. A Grammar of Ugaritic. SBL Resources for Biblical Studies. Atlanta: SBL Press.
2021. “The Septuagint, Scribalism, and Command-Execution Pairing.” Henoch 42 (2020): 150–67.
2021. “Translating and Transcending Textual Criticism,” Textus 30: 1–5.
2020. “A Reading of Psalm 104:1–13 according to the Text Contained in 4QPsalms-d.” Revue de Qumran 32: 251–65.
2020. “Verbal Argument Structure in the War Scroll.” Dead Sea Discoveries 27.
2020. “Some Oddities of Ancient Hebrew Numeral Syntax.” Hebrew Studies 61: 23–44.
2020. Carmen Palmer, Andrew Krause, Eileen Schuller, and John Screnock, eds. Dead Sea Scrolls, Revise and Repeat: New Methods and Perspectives on the Dead Sea Scrolls. SBL Early Judaism and Its Literature. SBL Press.
2019. “Reading Esther in the Levantine Literary Tradition.” Biblica 100: 321–338.
2018. “Complex Adding Numerals and Hebrew Diachrony.” Journal of Biblical Literature 137: 789–819.
