Rebecca Harris

Dr. Rebecca Harris is an Associate Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies. Dr. Harris came to Messiah in 2019 after completing her PhD at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She grew up in San Jose, CA, attended college near Santa Cruz, and worked as a children’s pastor in Sacramento before pursuing graduate work in biblical studies. Her research interests include the study of ancient Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls, religious experience in antiquity and contemporary society, and the Jewish world of Jesus and his earliest followers.

Prof. Harris is the author of Religious Experience and Divinization in the Sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls: Living in the Liminal (2025). Her scholarly work also includes articles and presentations on early Jewish eschatology, maternal imagery and pedagogical discourse (especially in 4 Maccabees), and constructions of time and temporality in antiquity.

Selected Publications

Books

Religious Experience and Divinization in the Sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls: Living in the Liminal (Brill, 2025).

Articles

“Who Rebirths the Sons? The Pregnant Male Metaphor and 4 Maccabees’ Intellectual Tug-of-War” (de Gruyter, forthcoming).

“Afterbirth and Rebirth in 4 Maccabees’ Portrait of (Wo)Manly Courage,” JSP 34/1 (2024): 49–64.

“Passover, Pesaḥ | Judaism | Second Temple and Hellenistic Judaism.” In Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, volume 23 (November 2024). Edited by Constance M. Furey et al. Berlin: de Gruyter. Online.

“4 Maccabees.” Pages 1682–1705 in The Westminster Study Bible with the Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal Books. Edited by Emerson B. Powery et al. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2024.

“Torah and Transformation: the Centrality of the Torah in the Eschatology of 2 Baruch,” Journal of Ancient Judaism (Dec, 2019).

• Ph.D., 2019, Rice University
• M.Phil., 2017, Rice University
• M.A., 2013, Hebrew Union College
• M.A., 2010, Regent University
• B.A., 2004, Bethany University

• Interpreting the Bible
• Greek 1, 2, and 3
• First Year Seminar: Between the Testaments
• The Bible and its Ancient Contexts

• Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
• New Testament
• Second Temple Judaism
• Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
• Time and Space in Early Jewish and Christian Literature