After being granted a Doctor Theologiae from Göttingen in 2003, he worked as part of the editorial team for De Gruyter in Berlin preparing an exhaustive list of lemmata for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception History.
[3] In 2004, he was hired as Jan Gertz's[4] first assistant in his chair at the University of Heidelberg where he taught courses, began an Habilitation, and participated for several seasons at the Ramat Rachel Excavations with Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming.
Beyond its historical implications, the book attends to diachronic method[7] throughout, seeking to bridge the gap between final-form[8] readings of Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and the source-based approach that Baruch Spinoza first introduced to the study of Ezra-Nehemiah.
His thesis is that the Bible is a project of peoplehood, a collection of disparate oral traditions, laws, and religious texts drawn together as a way to create a national identity for a diasporic post-exilic people, grappling with a catastrophic defeat.
The texts he examines are largely from the books of Joshua and Judges, where he gives considerable space to highlighting important women in the Bible, among whom are Rahab, whose tale epitomizes the archetypical outsider; and figures like Deborah and Jael for their significance in subverting male power.