Prof. Judith H. Newman is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism at Emmanuel College and the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She holds an MAR from Yale Divinity School and a PhD from Harvard University. Her publications include Before the Bible: The Liturgical Body and the Formation of Scriptures in Early Judaism (Oxford University Press, 2018), Early Jewish Prayers in Greek (De Gruyter, 2008) with Pieter van der Horst, and Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Scholars Press, 1999). She was awarded a multi-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for work on her current monograph project, The Participatory Past: Rethinking Time, Text, and Ancestors in Early Judaism.
Last Updated
September 20, 2025
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The precise origins of the practice of reading from the prophets in the synagogue are unknown, but early evidence can be seen in the story of Jesus visiting the synagogue in his hometown on Shabbat and reading from Isaiah (Luke 4:16–19). Yet the process of making prophetic scripture relevant to a contemporary audience began even earlier, as we see in the second-century B.C.E. book of Baruch.
The precise origins of the practice of reading from the prophets in the synagogue are unknown, but early evidence can be seen in the story of Jesus visiting the synagogue in his hometown on Shabbat and reading from Isaiah (Luke 4:16–19). Yet the process of making prophetic scripture relevant to a contemporary audience began even earlier, as we see in the second-century B.C.E. book of Baruch.
