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Jack M. Sasson

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Jack M. Sasson currently serves as Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt Divinity School and as a Professor of Classics at Vanderbilt University.[1] His research focuses primarily on Assyriology and Hebrew Scriptures, writing on the archives from eighteenth century BCE found at Mari, Syria, by the Euphrates, near the modern-day Syria-Iraq border as well as on biblical studies.

Born in Aleppo, Syria, on October 1, 1941, Sasson immigrated to the United States in 1955 after a significant stay in Lebanon where he attended the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools.[2] In America, Sasson enrolled in Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York, and then Brooklyn College, a constituent school of the City University of New York college system.[3] He received his B.A. in history in 1962 from Brooklyn College.[4]

Immediately after completing his undergraduate education, Sasson accepted a scholarship to pursue his graduate studies at Brandeis University. At Brandeis, he focused first on Islamic Studies, earning an M.A. in Mediterranean Studies in 1963.[5] Eventually, however, he earned his doctorate in Ancient Near Eastern Studies in 1966.[6]

Sasson taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, moving up the rank and becoming a full professor of Religious Studies in 1977.[7] In 1991, Sasson was appointed to the prestigious William R. Kenan Chair in Religious Studies where he remained until joining the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 1999.[8]

Sasson was president of the American Oriental Society from 1996 to 1997 and of the International Association for Assyriology from 2005 to 2009.[9][10] He also established and directed the Jewish Studies program at Vanderbilt University from 2002 to 2005.[11]

Selected publications

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