Jack M. Sasson

Jack M. Sasson, now retired, taught most recently as Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt Divinity School and before that as a Professor of Classics at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses primarily on Assyriology and Hebrew Scriptures, writing on the archives from eighteenth century BCE found at Mari, Syria, by the Euphrates, near the modern-day Syria-Iraq border as well as on biblical studies.

Born in Aleppo, Syria, on October 1, 1941, Sasson immigrated to the United States in 1955 after a significant stay in Lebanon where he attended the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools. In America, Sasson enrolled in Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York, and then Brooklyn College, which later became a constituent school of the City University of New York college system. He received his B.A. in history in 1962 from Brooklyn College.

Immediately after completing his undergraduate education, Sasson accepted a scholarship to pursue his graduate studies at Brandeis University. At Brandeis, he focused first on Islamic Studies, earning an M.A. in Mediterranean Studies in 1963. Eventually, however, he earned his doctorate in Ancient Near Eastern Studies in 1966, writing his dissertation under Cyrus Gordon.

Sasson taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, moving up the rank and becoming a full professor of Religious Studies in 1977. In 1991, Sasson was appointed to the prestigious William R. Kenan Chair in Religious Studies where he remained until joining the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 1999.

Sasson was president of the American Oriental Society from 1996 to 1997 and of the International Association for Assyriology from 2005 to 2009. He also established and directed the Jewish Studies program at Vanderbilt University from 2002 to 2005.