[2] From 1980 to 2003, Joffe participated in and directed archaeological research in Israel, Jordan, Greece and the United States.
[4] From 2012 to 2022, Joffe was the editor of The Ancient Near East Today, the weekly web magazine of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR).
[7][8] Joffe is an editor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East's BDS monitor, dedicated to opposing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement on college campuses.
[7] Joffe is noted for using evidence from archaeology and epigraphy to propose an "ethnic state" model to explain the rise of petty kingdoms in the southern Levant in the 10th century BC.
He describes Israel, Judah, Ammon, Moab and Edom as "ethnic states": "Politics integrated by means of identity, especially ethnicity, which are territorially based... they are novel and historically contingent political systems which appear in the Levant during the first millennium BCE thanks to the confluence of several factors, not least the collapse of imperial domination and the longstanding city-state system.