Michael Edward Stone (born 22 October 1938) is a professor emeritus of Armenian Studies and of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He attended North Sydney Boys High School where he studied Latin, Hebrew and Greek (First Class Honours).

In 1966 he returned to Israel, became a lecturer in Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in the following year became an associate professor.

His research focuses on two fields: Jewish thought and literature of the Second Temple period including its transmission into the Middle Ages; and Armenian Studies.

His work emphasizes texts and their interpretations but extends beyond a narrow textual focus to ideological analysis within religious and intellectual history.

The album is a large project that exhibits and analyzes the development of the Armenian script beginning with the most ancient dated manuscripts and up until the nineteenth century.

With Israeli archeologist Dr. David Amit, Stone researched and published on a medieval Jewish cemetery of southern Armenia.

On the tombstones there are inscriptions in both Hebrew and Aramaic that teach about the life of the Jewish community in southern Armenia, about which there was no information previously.

In the field of history of religious thought he has worked especially on apocalyptic literature and also on issues dealing with the central characteristics of Judaism of that period.

[14] This work was written originally in Hebrew approximately thirty years after the destruction of the Second Temple and translated into Greek.

His book features detailed interpretation of the verses together with a wider analysis of the literary dynamic and religious worldview of the author as revealed in the text's content and presentation of topics.

Over the years he wrote a series of articles on 4 Ezra, including the significance of structure, its notion of divine justice, as well as mystical and exegetical elements.

[16] A prominent factor of his exegetical approach to ancient texts is the idea that descriptions of religious phenomena may represent actual experiences of the author or of the circle from which he/she came.

[18] After many years of work, he published a critical Armenian edition of all twelve testaments of the sons of Jacob with the help of his former student, Dr. Vered Hillel (2012).

Since then, Stone published their joint edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments of The Testament of Levi in the DJD series.

[20] With Dr. Esther Eshel, Stone completed his and Greenfield's translation, exegesis, and research on this third- or second-century BCE work.

[22] Rabbi Moshe ha-Darshan, author of the Midrash Genesis Rabbati (France, eleventh century) knew of a similar or identical document to the Qumran one in a semitic language.

Stone founded the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Hebrew University in 1995 and directed it during its early years.

Toward the end of the 1990s, Stone returned to a subject he discussed in his earliest articles: the Armenian apocryphal "Death of Adam".

[26] He followed the spread of this legend, which has it that after Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, they sinned a second time due to Satan deceiving them.

The conceptual innovations and insight contained in Stone's writing on Second Temple Judaism (such as the transition from oral to written literature, the sociological approach to understanding the wisdom teacher, and questions pertaining to the pseudepigrapha) left a lasting impression on modern perceptions of the primary sources.

Stone collected photographs of graffiti inscriptions in many languages in the Sinai, the Negev, and the Christian holy places.

With the Israeli archeologist Dr. David Amit, Stone oversaw the excavation of the Jewish cemetery in Armenia and the publishing of the inscriptions.