Mark Stratton John Matthew Smith (born December 6, 1956) is an American Old Testament scholar and professor.
[citation needed] At Harvard, Smith studied with Frank Moore Cross, Thomas Lambdin, William Moran, and Michael D. Coogan.
He also began to explore the representation of deities and divinity in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East from the Bronze Age to the Greco-Roman period.
For several summers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he also studied Dead Sea Scrolls with John Strugnell at the Ecole Biblique.
[1] Smith made many contributions to the study of the Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic texts as well as Ugaritic literature and religion.