Last week, Robert Jones (Assistant Director, Jewish Studies; Assistant Research Professor, Jewish Studies & Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies) and Taylor Gray (Assistant Research Professor, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies) gave back-to-back public lectures at Axemann Brewery in Bellefonte, PA as a part of the “Science on Tap” series. “Science on Tap” is organized by the Science Policy Society at Penn State. It is a community forum for education about research conducted at Penn State. Scholars and other experts are invited to discuss their work in a way that can be accessible to the general public.
Their presentation was entitled “Ancient Hebrew Writing and the Politics of Language.” Dr. Gray spoke about the invention of the technology of writing and the adoption of the alphabet in early Hebrew writing in the first millennium BCE, and Dr. Jones spoke about the re-emergence of the Hebrew language centuries later as a vehicle for expressing political and religious identity after Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Ancient Near East.
