Profile

Professor Oded Lipschits, Ph.D.

Director, Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology

Bio

Oded Lipschits was born in 1963 and he is a professor for Jewish history in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures. Oded also serves as the Director of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, the director of the Lautenschläger Azekah Expedition, and the head of the international program in Ancient Israel Studies: Archaeology and History of the Land of the Bible.

His Ph.D. dissertation dealt with the Province of Judah in the sixth century BCE (The Babylonian Period), analyzing the archaeological data and the Biblical narratives in order to reconstruct the historical reality of that era. The second project lead by Prof. Lipschits is the administrative system of Judah during the eighth to second centuries BCE, centered along the excavations at Ramat Rahel (in the area of Jerusalem), where the cooperated Tel-Aviv and Heidelberg University project unearthed a monumental administrative center. Nowadays, Prof. Lipschits is leading several research projects dealing with the Judean Lowland, surrounding the ongoing project at Tel Azekah. These projects and more were published in numerous books and papers.

Oded lives with his wife Yael and their four (!) children in the beautiful Galilee in northern Israel. In many respects, he is the "father" of many M.A. and Ph.D. students, who worked at Ramat Rahel and who are now involved with the Azekah project.