William Schniedewind is Prof. of Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic Languages in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1992. He is currently the Chair of the Near Eastern Languages & Cultures department at UCLA. His research interests include social history of the ancient eastern Mediterranean world, sociolinguistics of Classical Hebrew, and ancient biblical interpretation. He was the Director of the Qumran Virtual Realit Project. He served on the Board of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (Jerusalem), and is on the Editorial Board for Tel Aviv and the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. He has authored four books: The Word of God in Transition (Sheffield, 1995), Society and the Promise to David (Oxford, 1999), How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge, 2004), and A Primer on Ugaritic (Cambridge, 2007).