ABSTRACT

Let me begin in 1977, the year in which I started my first academic job at the University of Tübingen in southern Germany – not far from Stuttgart, the city where I was born in 1946. I was the first to receive the then newly established chair of Hebrew language and ancient Judaism. I hoped I was well prepared for the job. I had studied Catholic theology, ancient Near Eastern studies, and Egyptology in Tübingen, Münster, Jerusalem, and Paris. Within nine years, I had produced four dissertations – one in Egyptology, written during a one-year stay at the famous École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, and three in Old Testament studies, submitted to the faculties of Tübingen and Freiburg, and which earned me a diploma, a doctorate, and a habilitation, i.e., the licence to teach at a university. In Jerusalem, I became very much involved with, and appreciative of, French archaeological research, epigraphy, and biblical studies. My habilitation thesis actually originated in Paris, where I spent a year of intensive study at the École des Hautes Études and the Collège de France.