Jacqueline Vayntrub

Jacqueline Vayntrub is an American scholar of Biblical studies and an associate professor of the Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School. Vayntrub earned her MA from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her PhD from University of Chicago, and before her appointment at Yale, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and an assistant professorship at Brandeis University. In 2019–2020, she was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Among the major contributions of her research, according to Steven Weitzman, is "challenging how scholars think about biblical poetry... [and] also challenging them to think in new ways about philology as a scholarly approach to ancient texts," including through an innovative focus on recovering “a native understanding of biblical poetry.” Gregory Sterling writes, "she is widely recognized as one of her generation's leading authorities on poetry and wisdom literature."

Her 2019 book Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms has been heralded for "tremendous theoretical work Vayntrub is engaged in, which goes beyond every instance of a handful of terms to query, more broadly, how the Hebrew Bible holistically theorizes its own textuality." Mark Leuchter similarly notes how the book "has far-reaching significance for broader issues across the field of biblical studies and the study of ancient Israelite religion and intellectual history," and is "a masterclass in the metacriticism of the field of biblical studies." The book has been described as "a timely and incisive contribution to the study not just of biblical poetry, or of representations of oral speech in biblical literature, but of what many biblical traditions fundamentally are and reflect. It fits alongside an emerging set of efforts to rethink many of the key assumptions that shaped the study of biblical traditions throughout the twentieth century, and in many respects, still exert an outsized influence today."

Vayntrub founded the Philology in Hebrew Studies program unit at the Society of Biblical Literature, and she is a founding member of Renewed Philology. Other major positions include as a series editor of The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies and as a general editor of the experimental online journal Metatron.

In addition to publishing over 20 articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes, Vayntrub has written popular pieces such as "Sexy Sunday School: Naughty Bible Translation" for JSTOR Daily and "Who Is the Eshet Chayil?" for TheTorah.Com.