T. M. Lemos is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Huron University College and a member of the graduate school faculty at the University of Western Ontario.  She earned her BA from Brown University in Judaic Studies and her PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University. She is a historian of ancient Israel and early Judaism and a biblical scholar.

How did you decide to become a biblical scholar? Share your autobiographical journey.

My parents are Azorean immigrants and religious Catholics.  My mother in particular is quite pious, and in the immigrant community in which I grew up it was common to have gatherings in people’s houses where we would pray the rosary before votive statues of the Virgin Mary or a crown representing the Espírito Santo.  Religion was very prominent in my life growing up and, to be entirely frank, I fought this tooth and nail.  I read the Bible, read books about religion, just to debunk Catholic dogma.  Interestingly, I ended up falling in love with Judaism, Jewish texts, and Jewish history.  I took biblical Hebrew my very first semester at Brown and started taking courses with Saul Olyan my junior year.  Saul ended up being my thesis advisor and mentor.  I joke with him now that being introduced to biblical studies through him really misled me—I thought the field was full of secular gay Jews.  It isn’t.  Speaking seriously, though, I really cannot understate his influence on my becoming a biblicist versus some other type of scholar.  I had considered getting a Ph.D. in Portuguese and Brazilian studies—in fact, I would fit in better in that field in many ways than I do in Biblical Studies.  However, Saul was just such a good mentor to me.  I was a working-class kid at an elite school who was coming out of the closet and had never known even one openly gay person growing up.  I really needed a good mentor.  He became a kind of parent figure to me, and so choosing to be a scholar of the Hebrew Bible seemed fitting and appealing to me. 

Tell us about your work (past and current). What are you most excited about right now? What do you hope your work will contribute?

I have written on a variety of topics, but essentially all have fallen into the categories of social and cultural history.  In recent years, I have written extensively on violence.  My 2017 book Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts examines the connection between bodies and status, exploring how status affects what can be done to bodies but also how what is done to bodies affects status.  The book identifies connections between personhood, hypermasculinity, domination, and violence—domination personhood, I call this—not just in ancient Israel but in the wider ancient West Asian context.  The last chapter compares Israelite domination personhood with domination personhood as it emerges in certain contexts in the United States.  I identify similarities between ancient violence and the treatments inflicted on prisoners’ bodies at Abu Ghraib prison and on African-Americans by police officers in the U.S.  To be honest, I was unwilling to write this book unless it addressed contemporary violence in some way.

What I am most excited about right now in terms of my research is examining how some early Jewish literature reconfigures the predominant way of understanding personhood in the region and especially how this relates to images of animals.  I am also excited to be the co-editor of the first volume of the Cambridge World History of Genocide with Ben Kiernan and Tristan Taylor.  I have always attempted to bridge the perceived gap between the ancient and the contemporary in my work, and it is great to be able to do this in a concerted way through involvement in this genocide project.  I would describe myself as a scholar with decidedly neo-materialist and humanist tendencies—I am interested in understanding the lived experiences of human beings, what shapes their lives, what leads to human flourishing, and what leads to precarity of existence, pain, torture, exploitation, and death for some and not others.  My goals are larger than merely understanding the corpus of Israelite literature or the sweep of Israelite history.  I seek to uncover the intersections and divergences between the experiences of social groups in order to identify why some human lives are constrained in particular ways and why some are not.  Working on a transhistorical, cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary project like the Cambridge World History of Genocide is exactly what I want to be doing to further these goals.

Who has most influenced you as a scholar? Tells us a bit about it.

This is a common question, and I find its very commonness interesting to contemplate.  Why, I wonder, do we ask about the who and not the what?  That is, why not ask: What has influenced you most as a scholar?  Why are we always so concerned with grafting ourselves onto the genealogy of important scholars rather than asking what it is about our own histories and communities and biographies and identities and bodies that have influenced us as scholars?  For me, the answer to this latter question is quite important.  I will illustrate with an anecdote.  When I was a child, my mother used to bring me with her as she went to clean the house of a family much wealthier than ours.  The woman she worked for actually accused me of stealing a doll from her when I was just five years old.  Now, I swear to you on the soul of my mother that I did not steal that doll, but the experience inculcated in me at that tender age the knowledge that my status was lower than that of some people and that this involved a lack of safety for me.  My adolescence was really difficult and characterized by a lack of safety, as well.  I was really smart, socially awkward, and tomboyish, and many people around me were unforgiving of these traits, to the point of physical harassment, threats, and occasionally violence.

So, why am I a scholar of violence?  Why has so much of my research dealt with status, with lines and rituals of inclusion and exclusion, with patterns of domination and subordination?  Why am I interested in gender and ethnicity and identity?  It is not because of which scholars I have read but because of the experiences of my life, the things I have seen, heard, and felt.  Yes, the work of certain scholars has had a major influence—Saul Olyan, Susan Niditch, Robert Coote, a long list of anthropologists—but my life experiences and relationships have influenced me more.  I think that we in academia need to be more open about this, because it is true for most if not all scholars yet it is a fact not discussed often enough.

What are the most pressing issues or concerns you have related to the broader field of biblical studies?

I am concerned about the lack of diversity in the field.  It is a very male field and a very white field.  I find this very problematic.  The field is also far too content to keep putting out dissertations on one verse in Luke or new source-critical reconstructions that are just as speculative as the old ones while ignoring important developments in other areas of the academy and in the larger world.  If we don’t progress and do it fast, we are going to exegete ourselves out of existence, and no one is going to miss us.

Why study the scriptures/biblical text?

I see myself as a historian first and foremost, and I study Israelite texts to understand Israelites.  Why do I care and why should we care to understand Israelites?  For one thing, they are a very important case study for understanding the effects of ancient imperialism on subject peoples.  We have plenty of sources for understanding violence and domination in ancient societies from the perspective of the conquerors, but far fewer sources for understanding the experience of being conquered.  I think this is a fascinating and pivotally important aspect of studying biblical texts.

What do you like to do for fun?

I like to cook and eat good food.  I am lazy about following recipes and would rather just invent new dishes, which I think I am pretty good at.  I also like taking walks in the woods with my daughter Cyrene and my mini schnauzer Zumbi, love to travel, and like to play scrabble with my wife, who often beats me because she clogs up the board in order to block me, and I would rather focus on making impressive seven-letter words than playing offensively.  Or at least, this is the excuse I like to give for why she kicks my butt on a regular basis.