My name is Michael Johnson, and I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Hebrew Literature at Hebrew University. I specialize in early Judaism and psalms and prayers from the Second Temple period (515 BCE-70 CE).

I recently defended my dissertation, “Reassessing the Genres of the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms from Qumran).” It examines the categories that scholars have developed for the psalms in the Hodayot tradition (Teacher Hymns and Community Hymns) and offers a revised categorization schema based on the genre of the psalms rather than the persona of the author or speaker.

In my current work I am revising the reconstructions of the manuscripts 1QHodayot^a and 4QHodayot^a. These reconstructions will form the basis for exploring where the manuscripts fit among the corpus of liturgically-oriented texts discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls and what they tell us about the emergence of liturgical practices already in the Second Temple period.

Please feel free to explore my research blog or check my calendar for upcoming events.