About

Bruce Wells is an Associate Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Liberal Arts. His academic focus includes law, religion, and culture in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia, with particular expertise in pentateuchal studies. His work explores marriage and family relations in the ancient world, contributing to a deeper understanding of the social and religious dynamics of early civilizations. As a faculty member, he is engaged in teaching and research that advance knowledge in these areas, supporting the academic mission of the department and the university.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Geology
• Art
• Seismology
• Literature

Selected publications

• The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-11 · 1 citations

  bookOpen access

  This Companion offers a comprehensive overview of the history, nature, and legacy of biblical law. Examining the debates that swirl around the nature of biblical law, it explores its historical context, the significance of its rules, and its influence on early Judaism and Christianity. The volume also interrogates key questions: Were the rules intended to function as ancient Israel's statutory law? Is there evidence to indicate that they served a different purpose? What is the relationship between this legal material and other parts of the Hebrew Bible? Most importantly, the book provides an in-depth look at the content of the Torah's laws, with individual essays on substantive, procedural, and ritual law. With contributions from an international team of experts, written specially for this volume, The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible provides an up-to-date look at scholarship on biblical law and outlines themes and topics for future research.

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• The Biblical Laws

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-11

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• The Legacy of Biblical Law

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-11

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• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-11

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  The introduction presents key ideas and terminology and answers several questions that will help readers understand the other chapters in the volume. It also explains important distinctions around the concept of biblical law and the pitfalls of reading it from a modern perspective.

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• Cambridge Companions To Religion <i>(continued from page iii)</i>

  2024-04-11

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• Text Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-11

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• The Historical Context of Biblical Law

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-11

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• Legal Science

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-05-09 · 1 citations

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  This chapter seeks to understand 'legal science' from the internal point of view of each tradition and society, in order to avoid a conception too heavily influenced by contemporary views. To do so, reference is made both to the set of activities carried out by 'legal experts' in the whole domain of law (legislation, adjudication, legal counseling and education), and to the legal experts themselves, as far as they were regarded as such by their own societies. This approach requires first to establish the extent to which, in each society under consideration, knowledge of law was considered as autonomous knowledge. A sociological perspective is then adopted, identifying who in each society were considered legal experts, i.e. persons deemed to possess the legal knowledge to such a degree that it characterized their social position and/or function. The chapter then proceeds in a progressively more content-oriented manner towards a comparative description of legal science, focusing on how legal training took place in each society under consideration and in what literary forms the legal experts expressed themselves, to finally arrive at the core question, namely the description of the respective forms of legal reasoning.

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• The Biblical Legal Collections

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-11

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• The Nature of the Collections

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-11 · 1 citations

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  This chapter introduces the biblical law collections or codes: the Ten Commandments, the Covenant Collection, the Priestly Collection, the Holiness Collection, and the Deuteronomic Collection. It examines whether they come from a particular source, whether they should be considered mainly legal or literary works, and whether later collections sought to revise or reinterpret earlier ones.

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Frequent coauthors

• F. Rachel Magdalene

  15 shared

• Cornelia Wunsch

  12 shared

• Sophie Démare‐Lafont

  4 shared

• Sandra Jacobs

  KU Leuven

  3 shared

• Thomas Kazen

  3 shared

• Caroline Humfress

  University of St Andrews

  3 shared

• Sara J. Milstein

  3 shared

• Thomas Krüger

  3 shared