Dylan Moss (UK)

I’m a first year MPhil Theology student, my subject area being the Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism. The MPhil involves writing a number of essays, and I intend to write about such topics as the category of written text and performance using the Book of Lamentations as a case study, and the complex relationship between gardens and burial spaces in ancient Judaism. In spite of their different topics, my essays will share their largely philological approach, and in the essays I hope to think about how philology in Hebrew Bible studies may be revitalised in light of critical assessments of philology in recent scholarship.

I was born in England, but home for me is Cardiff in South Wales, where I havejud lived almost all my life. Last academic year I completed a BA in Hebrew, also here at Oxford, in which I received intensive training in the language’s major forms including Classical and Modern Hebrew. I was awarded the 2025 Student Essay Prize by the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies for my dissertation supervised by Prof. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger on the only known manuscript of a medieval Arthurian Romance in Hebrew, and how, in my view, its author adapted material from the Vulgate Cycle to produce this new text that presents Lancelot as a “new” King David. I was fortunate enough to personally study the manuscript in the Vatican Library.

Having attended a state school in Wales, I am concerned by the fact that fewer and fewer state school students there study humanities subjects in school and consequently at university. If we as scholars want to protect the vitality of the humanities, then we need to do more to encourage people’s interests in them. In my own subject, I am currently tentatively thinking about how existing initiatives like Classics for All which support classics teaching in UK state schools may be replicated with regards Classical Hebrew.

Reflecting on Ertegun’s stated mission to bring the world together by intellectually removing barriers, I believe that scholarship in Jewish and Hebrew Bible studies, such as mine, has today a role to play in pushing back against the recent marked increase in antisemitism in the UK and elsewhere by helping improve understanding of Jewish experience over history and in doing so encouraging empathy for Jewish communities.

When I’m not thinking about Classical Hebrew morphology, I can be found reading books on Central European history, or obsessively scouring the internet for the latest in US rap music.