Joel Veinberg (Russian: Йоэль Пейсахович (Иоэл Песахович) Вейнберг, Latvian: Joels Veinbergs; born 1922 in Riga, died in 2011 in Jerusalem), also known as Joel Weinberg,[1] was a Latvian and Soviet orientalist and historian of Jewish origin.
He graduated from a high school with language of instruction in Hebrew in Latvia and started university studies in history.
Joel Veinberg was one of the few Jewish historians in the USSR who could work in the "inactual" (from the point of view of the Soviet officialdom) fields such as ancient Jewish history and culture.
He published numerous works on the Ancient Orient («Человек в культуре древнего Ближнего Востока», М., 1986 ("Man and Culture in the Ancient Orient", published in Moscow)), Second Temple period and especially the Persian period, as well as on the Bible ("The Old Testament in the Light of Current Science", in Latvian, Riga, 1966).
Beginning in 1994 he worked at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev as professor at the department of Bible and Ancient Orient.