Here, you can find information about my scholarly activities. After an introduction to my work and positions, you can find links to and descriptions of scholarly articles of mine, and then of my two scholarly (English-language) monographs, which were originally published by Eisenbrauns, but can now be downloaded freely and legally as PDFs (see further below)
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I am Reader and Senior Lecturer in Old Testament Exegesis/Hebrew Bible Studies at Lund University, where I also received my PhD in 2012. Between 2018 and 2023, I was Pro Futura Scientia fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala; as part of that fellowship, I spent a year as visiting scholar at the Centre for Research in the Arts Social Sciences and Humanities and Wolfson College in Cambridge. I have also spent several working periods at the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome.
I have had research funding from the Swedish Research Council and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation) – the two major research funding agencies in Sweden – as well as by the Swedish Nuclear Waste Management Co. I studied under, among others, Tryggve Mettinger, Sten Hidal, Fredrik Lindström, Olle Qvarnström, and Martin Gansten.
I specialize in Ancient Near Eastern languages, specifically Ugaritic and ancient Hebrew. but I also work with many other languages from Antiquity (such as Hittite, Luwian, Phoenician, Hurrian, Sanskrit, and Etruscan). The main points of my scholarly work has been the study of inherited poetic motifs in Northwest Semitic texts (biblical and Ugaritic), the interaction between ancient speakers of Semitic and Indo-European in the Ancient Near East, and Northwest Semitic historical phonology. I have been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes (cf. CV, below).
I am on the editorial board of the Coniectanea Biblica book series, and from 2022 to 2024, I was one of the editors of the journal Ugarit-Forschungen.
My academic CV can be downloaded HERE (updated as of June 2024).
My page at the Lund University website can be found HERE. My publication list at the LU website is HERE.
You can view a number of on-line lectures by yours truly (some in English, some in Swedish), as well as hear some music and other things (including readings and recitations from ancient languages), on YouTube, HERE.
You can see a long-form interview with me about my work on the preservation of nuclear-waste information over vast periods of time and its relationship to philology and exegesis on the YouTube channel Escaped Sapiens, HERE!
First – academic articles:
I have published a large number of scholarly articles on issues such as
* Hebrew and Ugaritic historical phonology,
* the Hebrew "tense" system,
* Maediaeval astrological readings of Genesis 15,
* biblical wordplay,
* the preservation of information about nuclear waste (!),
..... and of course, my two main areas:
* poetic motifs inherited from early Northwest Semitic into Ugaritic
and
* Biblical Hebrew and interactions between speakers of Indo-European and ancient Semitic languages.
To read many of these articles, see my page on Academia.edu, HERE!
A few recent examples:
A recent article on the "emphatic" sounds of Northwest Semitic (esp. Hebrew and Ugaritic)
An article on the Northwest Semitic and Central Semitic temporal systems
An article on terms borrowed from Persian and Arabic into Sanskrit astrological texts
If there are other articles you would like a copy of (and which are not posted on my Academia.edu page), send me an email!
And then, English-language monographs:
DROUGHT, DEATH, AND THE SUN IN UGARIT AND ANCIENT ISRAEL: A PHILOLOGICAL AND COMPARATIVE STUDY (2014)
This book, which is the international, revised version of my doctoral thesis, studies the poetic motif of the destructive, burning Sun both in the Hebrew Bible and in the cuneiform-alphabetic texts from Ugarit in Syria – most importantly, the so-called Baal Cycle:
The goal of the study is to elucidate the interconnected motifs of drought and death in the Bronze Age cuneiform alphabetic texts from Ugarit in Syria and the survival of these motifs as they appear in the world and text of the Hebrew Bible.
The sun and its heat are two of the most universal symbols known to humanity; the sun can be a giver of life, but its hot, scorching rays can also be associated with drought and the forces of destruction. The Ugaritic texts portray the sun goddess, Shapshu, as the sender of terrible drought; she manifests the rule of the god of death through her burning rays. The daily passage of the sun below the horizon also connects her with the land of the dead, and this idea is conflated with that of the destructive drought-sun into the image of a “sun of death.” Wikander discusses the philology of these passages (especially in the Baal Cycle) and follows the motif of solar drought and its connections with the netherworld into the literature of ancient Israel, noting transformations of the motif when influenced by the rising prominence of YHWH.
In the Hebrew Bible, the study traces terminology that refers to the ancient motifs of drought, death, and the sun in texts such as 1 Kings 17-18, Jeremiah 14, Hosea 13, and Malachi 3, as well as passages from the Psalms, using both linguistic and religio-historical methods. The transformations of these motifs indicate changes that Israelite religion went through as it gained its own identity within a greater Northwest Semitic context.
The dissertation on which this work is based has been awarded prizes by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters–History and Antiquities and the Royal Society of Letters at Lund.
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”Ola Wikander provides a great wealth of insights into the Ugaritic and Israelite conceptions of death, seen through the lens of his new interpretation of the Ugaritic solar deity Shapshu as a liminal figure who could be associated with both life, via her association with fertility, and death, due to her association with drought. . . . The wealth of insights that Wikander adduces are too numerous to recount here,. . . . The study is written in a lively and engaging style . . . [and] is overall a well-written, scholarly, and above all thoroughly thought-provoking study.”
Laura Quick in Review of Biblical Literature 2015
"The philological and prosodical analysis is excellent… a significant contribution to both Ugaritic and biblical studies."
Nicolas Wyatt in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 2015
UNBURNING FAME:
HORSES, DRAGONS, BEINGS OF SMOKE, AND OTHER INDO-EUROPEAN MOTIFS IN UGARIT AND THE HEBREW BIBLE
In this book, Ola Wikander studies Indo-European influences in the literary world of the Hebrew Bible and the Ugaritic texts, tracing a number of poetic motifs and other concepts originating in the Indo-European linguistic milieux of the greater Ancient Near East (e.g., among Anatolians and in Indo-European traditions transmitted through Mitanni)--and possibly at earlier, reconstructible levels--as they influenced what became Northwest Semitic poetic culture. The methodology used is what Wikander refers to as "etymological poetics: " the study of poetic and mythological structures as transmitted through specific lexical material.
Among the motifs studied are "smoke" as a simile for human life, the great serpent-battling tales of Northwest Semitic in comparison with similar stories among Indo-European-speakers (focusing on the titulature of the combatants and on the reconstruction of inherited and calqued poetic formulas), the etymology of the divine name "Dagan," and terminology and ideas related to borders and living outside of established social norms, including the concept of the gēr, the "sojourner" or "resident alien." The study discusses the importance of early poetic borrowings for tracing the interactions between cultural and linguistic contexts, and--using the methodology of "etymological poetics"--employs these motifs and their history as a way of uncovering new, exegetically relevant interpretations of key texts. Ugaritic passages from the Baal and Aqhat texts, as well as biblical passages from (among others) Hosea, Psalms, 1 Kings, and Judges are given new interpretations.
One of the motifs discussed is that of destroying heat being used as a metaphor for forgetting important cultural memories and, consequently, of the resilience of such memories being expressed as resistance to burning. Thus, bringing these ancient connections between Indo-European and Northwest Semitic culture into the open is, in a sense, showing their "Unburning Fame."
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The monograph is, as stated in the preface, clearly a labor of love and will have no trouble finding an audience. With its bouts of humor and clever turns of phrase, it is also easy to read and concise in size, which is why it can be recommended for anyone interested in the latest and occasionally the quirkiest views on some of the most fascinating but largely unanswerable questions of interpretation of terms and concepts found within the Hebrew Bible."
- Joanna Töyräänvuori in Review of Biblical Literature 2019
Copyright Ⓒ 2024 Ola Wikander
