Midway through his appointment, he was invited to spend a year as a visiting scholar in the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Johannes Gutenberg University, in Mainz, Germany (1992–1993).
[4] This position was the first endowed chair in the College of Liberal Arts and was seen as distinctive for confirming the significance of the academic study of religion within a public and state university.
[9] On May 6, 2010, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, the oldest professional organization of Judaica scholars in North America.
[10] Fellows are nominated and elected by their peers and thus constitute the most distinguished and most senior scholars teaching Judaic studies at American universities.
This upcoming conference, scheduled for May 25–29, 2014, in Jerusalem, will focus primarily on the formation of the Pentateuch and its interaction with both the prophetic corpus and the historiographic literature of the Hebrew Bible.
[14]: 386 Levinson asserts this is a necessary basic understanding, but that it is insufficient to explain how the separate constituent parts of text and tradition became invested with the kind of cultural authority needed to begin the process of creating scripture in the first place.
[14]: 390 Cuneiform literature exhibits many of the same characteristics of Hebrew literature, but cuneiform never formed into "anything like a scripture, either with its distinctive textual features, ...[or] its distinctive ideological features, such as the truth claims it mounts, the extraordinary demands for adherence it requires from its audience to uphold the demands it seeks to place upon them, or the polemics it makes opposing competing ideologies".
[14]: 387 Levinson says, this makes the Pentateuch unique: "Nothing similar ever took place for the multiple legal collections or epic works of ancient Mesopotamia or the world of classical antiquity".
[14]: 381 One example is Deuteronomy 32 which evidences the elimination of two verses proclaiming Yahweh's rule over a divine pantheon leaving a text that makes little sense.
[14]: 391 "As Morton Smith suggested, the complex redaction of the Pentateuch seems to point to a social compromise between competing sectarian and ethnographic communities during the Second Temple period".