Professor Jan Joosten

Jan Joosten

Jan Joosten (born 1959) studied theology in Brussels and Princeton, and Semitic languages in Jerusalem. He earned a PhD in Semitic languages at the Hebrew University in 1989, and a ThD at the Protestant Faculty in Brussels in 1994. Since then he teaches at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the University of Strasbourg, first as professor of Biblical Languages, and from 2004 as professor of Old Testament. He was appointed senior member of the Institut Univer-sitaire de France in 2009. Since 2010 he is chief editor of the journal Vetus Testamentum. In 2012 he was elected president of the executive committee of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. Together with Eberhard Bons, he is the editor of the Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint.

He is married with four children. 

Publications: Selected books

The Syriac Language of the Peshitta and Old Syriac Versions of Matthew. Syntactic Structure, Inner-Syriac Developments and Translation Technique , SSLL 22 (Leiden, Brill, 1996).

People and Land in the Holiness Code. An Exegetical Study of the Ideational Framework of the Law in Leviticus 17-26 , VTS 67 (Leiden, Brill, 1996).

With Eberhard Bons:

Septuagint Vocabulary. Pre-History, Usage, Reception, SCS 58 (Atlanta, SBL, 2011)

Selected articles

“The Gospel of Barnabas and the Diatessaron”, Harvard Theological Review 95 (2002), 73-96. 

“The Distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew as Reflected in Syntax”, Hebrew Studies 46 (2005), 327-339.

“La persuasion coopérative dans le discours sur la loi: Pour une analyse de la rhétorique du Code de Sainteté”, in

A. Lemaire, ed., Congress Volume Ljubljana 2007, VTS 133 (Leiden, 2010), 381-398 

“The Aramaic Background of the  Seventy: Language, Culture and History”, BIOSCS 43 (2010), 53-72.

The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew
On J. Joosten, The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew