Professor Portier-Young specializes in second temple Jewish literature, with special attention to early Jewish apocalypses, testaments, and novellas from the third through first centuries BCE. Her other research interests include prophecy, embodiment, incarceration, identity, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity, and traditions of violence and nonviolence in Old Testament and other early Jewish literature. Her book Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Eerdmans, 2011) views the first Jewish apocalypses as literature of resistance to imperial domination and hegemony. Her second book, Prophecy in the Body (in progress), argues for the centrality of embodied experience, action, and reception within ancient Israelite and Judean prophecy. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Scripture and Justice (Lexington Press). Portier-Young has published scholarly articles on violence in biblical literature, apocalyptic literature and imagination, and on the books Daniel, Judges, Esther, Tobit, 1 Enoch, Testament of Job, Joseph and Aseneth, and 1 Corinthians. She writes regularly for the website WorkingPreacher.org.
In the Media
Portier-Young and Hall discuss breath at Interfaith Institute
News and Stories
Thea Portier-Young Builds Community in Online Classroom
Teaching the Old Testament with Zoom, dance parties, and blue suede shoes.