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David H. Aaron has been Professor of Hebrew Bible and History of Interpretation at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, since 1998. He is also the Director of Scholarly Publications.

He earned a doctorate from the department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University; he holds Rabbinic Ordination from HUC-JIR (Cincinnati ‘83). Prior to coming to HUC-JIR, Aaron taught Bible and Rabbinic Literature in the Religion Department of Wellesley College (1991-98) and Biblical Studies at Boston’s Hebrew College (1987-91).

Professor Aaron is the author of Biblical Ambiguities: Metaphor, Semantics, and Divine Imagery (2001); Etched in Stone: the Emergence of the Decalogue (2006); and Genesis Ideology (forthcoming, 2013). He is presently completing a commentary on Pirke Avot called Subversive Principles: Reflections on a Foundational Text. As a fellow at the Frankel Institute of the University of Michigan, Aaron began work on a large study that blends theories of complexity and pan-computationalism with a philosophy of causality in history. This interdisciplinary study, tentatively titled, Approaching Daybreak: On Complexity and Historical Causality, will entail two volumes; the first will deal specifically with complexity theory and historiography, the second with the ideology of Hebrew language usage in Judaism from the biblical period through the writings of Abraham ibn Ezra.

Aaron’s scholarly articles have appeared in a variety of journals, includingHarvard Theological Review, Journal of the Academy of Religion, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Approaches to Ancient Judaism, Hebrew Union College Annual, and AJS Review. He is a contributor to the Brill Encyclopedia of Midrash (2005); the Blackwell Companion to Judaism (2004), and the Encyclopedia of the Hebrew Language and Linguistics (2010).