Richard Elliott Friedman earned his doctorate at Harvard, was a visiting fellow at Cambridge and Oxford and a senior fellow of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. He participated in the City of David Project archaeological excavations of biblical Jerusalem. He is the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia and Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego.
He has authored the bestselling Who Wrote the Bible? as well as The Disappearance of God, The Hidden Book in the Bible, Commentary on the Torah, The Bible with Sources Revealed, The Bible Now, and The Exile and Biblical Narrative. His books have been translated into Hebrew, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, Korean, and French. He has also edited four books and authored over eighty articles, essays, and reviews.
Interviewed by Larry King and NPR and consulted by Dreamworks, NBC, A&E, PBS "Nova," Newsweek, and U.S. News, Friedman has been called "The single most interesting mind working on the Bible in any language today" (Jacob Neusner), "refreshingly honest" (Alan Dershowitz), and "one of the greatest biblical scholars of our age" (Conservative Judaism).

"The study of the Bible is at a vital juncture." Thus begins this merger of a stellar group of scholars of both literary and historical perspectives on the Hebrew Bible: Robert Alter, Baruch Halpern, Shemaryahu Talmon, Jacob Milgrom, Nahum Sarna, and Jack Miles, and edited by Richard Elliott Friedman. In this seminal work they raise questions of conception, technique, and audience, treating both the Bible's authors and editors. At bottom, the question that all are addressing is: in what way(s) is the study of the Bible different from the study of other literature? Their answers, it should come as no surprise, all have to do with the Bible's special life as sacred literature.