Mahri Leonard-Fleckman

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Religious Studies, Classics

Associate Professor
Ph.D., New York University
Fields: Hebrew Bible, Ancient Middle East Studies

 

Contact Information

Email: mleonard@holycross.edu
Office: Smith 431

Biography

Mahri Leonard-Fleckman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Classics, and an affiliate of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program. She earned her Ph.D. and M.Phil. from New York University in Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, and her M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in New York. She received her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in Spanish and English Literature, after which she served in the Peace Corps Dominican Republic. Before transitioning to Holy Cross, Leonard-Fleckman was an Assistant Professor at the University of Scranton (2015-2016) and at Providence College (2016-2018). 

Leonard-Fleckman is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Middle East. She specializes in the history and religions of ancient Israel/Palestine, Syria, and Iraq in the first millennium BCE, a time of immense political and cultural transformations. She is particularly interested in scribal practices, methods of history writing, and the dynamics of empire, including responses to empire across different cultural groups. She is author of Scribal Representations and Social Landscapes of the Iron Age Shephelah (Oxford University Press, 2025), The House of David: Between Political Formation and Literary Revision (Fortress, 2016), co-author of The Book of Ruth in the Wisdom Commentary Series (Liturgical Press, 2017), and co-editor of "A Community of Peoples" (Brill, 2022). She is currently working on a book on The Assyrian Royal Annals (under contract, Cambridge University Press).

Leonard-Fleckman is also engaged in public scholarship, and she is the author of the award-winning popular series Ponder: Contemplative Bible Study (Liturgical Press, 2022, 2021, and 2020). She is currently co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements series The Ancient Near Eastern World and the Bible (ANEWB), a member of the editorial team of the Wisdom Commentary series (Liturgical Press), and she is active on numerous other editorial boards and professional committees.

Courses

  • HEBR 101 Intro to Biblical Hebrew
  • HEBR 199 Intro to Biblical Hebrew II
  • RELS 126 Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 
  • CLAS 199 Hellenistic Religious Resistance
  • RELS 241 Scripture & Script: The Bible and Contemporary Art, Media, and Literature
  • RELS 242 Sex, Gender, & the Hebrew Bible 
  • RELS/CLAS 299 God(s) and (Wo)men in Antiquity
  • HONS 299 Resistance, Then and Now
  • RELS 304 Land and Creation 

Select Recent Articles 

  • "Samson, Saul, and the Creation of Judah's History." Pages 181-196 in Johannes Klein and David Shepherd, eds. Between Fiction and Fact: Historicity and Religiosity in the Books of Samuel. BWANT 248. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2025. 

  • "Histories of Ancient Israel: Present State and Future Potential. A Review of Recent Works by Christian Frevel and Bernd Schipper." Vetus Testamentum 74 (2024): 303-310.
  • "Irresolution as Historical Practice and the Case of the Unnamed Woman in Timnah." Journal of Biblical Literature 142/3 (2023): 409-429.
  • “1–2 Samuel.” Pages 415–500 in Steven L. McKenzie, et al., eds. Introduction and annotation revisions to The SBL Study Bible, Updated Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 2023.
  • "Betwixt and Between: The Elusiveness of Israel's Iron Age Timnah." Pages 65-81 in Sara Mohr and Shane Thompson, eds. Power and Identity at the Margins of the Ancient Near East. Denver: University of Colorado Press, 2023.
  • With Peter Dubovský and Shuichi Hasegawa, eds. Special volume on "Israel and Phoenicia." Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel. Volume 11/2. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022.
  • "Lamenting Tyre (Ezekiel 27): A Unique Perspective on Judah's Proximate Other." Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 11/2 (2022): 134-151.
  • "Tamar, Delilah, and a Nameless Timnite: Women as (De)constructions of Social Landscape." Pages 60-72 in Barbara Reid, ed. Forget Not God's Benefits (Ps103:2): Festschrift in Honor of Leslie J. Hoppe. CBQI 3. Baltimore: Catholic Biblical Association, 2022.
  • "Judges." Pages 402-21 In John J. Collins, et al., eds. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. London: Bloomsbury, T & T Clark, 2022.