Jacqueline Vayntrub


Jacqueline Vayntrub is an American scholar of Biblical studies and an associate professor of the Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School. Her work addressees biblical poetry and wisdom literature.

Education and career

Vayntrub earned her MA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her PhD from University of Chicago, and before her appointment at Yale, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and an assistant professorship at Brandeis University. In 2019–2020, she was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Vayntrub founded the Philology in Hebrew Studies program unit at the Society of Biblical Literature, and she is a founding member of Renewed Philology. She has been series editor of The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, the International Critical Commentary, and an editor of the experimental online journal Metatron.

Beyond Orality

Her 2019 book Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms addressed "how the Hebrew Bible holistically theorizes its own textuality." In a review for Studies in Relgion, Mark Leuchter praised the book as "a masterclass in the metacriticism of the field of biblical studies."
Andrew Tobolowsky, writing for the Ancient Jew Review, described the book as "a timely and incisive contribution"