[3] He is a specialist in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Judaism in Late Antiquity, the history of Jewish law, and Talmudic literature.

He received his BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University.

[6] During the academic year 1989/90 he was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of a research group dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He is a member of the board of the World Union for Jewish Studies and the Society for Biblical Literature where he served as chairman of the Qumran section.

[14] He also played a role in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led to the full publication of the scrolls and to the decision of the Israel Antiquities Authority to make them fully available to the academic community.

He focuses in his research on showing that the Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish texts and do not have far-reaching and dramatic implications for the study of Christianity.

[19] 2014: co-recipient of the National Jewish Book Award in the Scholarship category with Louis H. Feldman and James L. Kugel for editing Outside the Bible