Aaron
J.
Koller
Professor of Near Eastern Studies
Wilf campus - Belfer Hall
Room#543
Aaron Koller is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Yeshiva University, where he studies Semitic languages. He is the author of Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (JPS/University of Nebraska Press, 2020) and Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014), among other books, and the editor of five more. Aaron has served as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and held research fellowships at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research and the Hartman Institute. In 2022-2023 he will be a Bye-Fellow at Cambridge University and a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford. He lives in Queens, NY with his partner, Shira Hecht-Koller, and their children.
Professor Koller studies the languages and ÐÔ°®ÌìÌà of the Near East from the Late Bronze Age through rabbinic times. He has written on biblical literature, the ÐÔ°®ÌìÌà of biblical interpretation, Semitic languages, and Jewish intellectual ÐÔ°®ÌìÌÃ. For the past few years he has been working on the ÐÔ°®ÌìÌà of writing, and of the alphabet in particular.
Authored Books The Ancient Hebrew Semantic Field of Cutting Tools: A Philological, Archaeological, and Semantic Study (Washington, DC, 2012). Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (Cambridge, 2014). Unbinding Isaac: The Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (JPS, 2020). Edited Books Talmuda de-Eretz Israel: Archaeology and the Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine (ed. Steven Fine and Aaron Koller; Studia Judaica 73; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). Moshe Bar-Asher, Studies in Classical Hebrew (trans. and ed. Aaron Koller; Studia Judaica 71; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). Studies in Mishnaic Hebrew and Related Fields (ed. Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal and Aaron Koller; Yale University, 2017). Iran, Israel, and the Jews: Symbiosis and Conflict from the Achaemenids to the Islamic Republic (ed. Aaron Koller & Daniel Tsadik; Wipf and Stock, 2019). Semitic, Biblical, and Jewish Studies in honor of Richard C. Steiner (ed. Aaron J. Koller, Mordechai Z. Cohen and Adina Moshavi; Bialik and Yeshiva University Press, 2020).
Koller’s 25 articles and 20 book reviews are available at and .
Wilf campus - Belfer Hall
Room#543