Carol Newsom is Charles Howard Professor of Old Testament at Emory University. Given the task to translate and publish a portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls for her doctoral dissertation, she has remained the authority on the “Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice,” publishing her dissertation through Scholar’s Press, doing the section on the Sabbath Sacrifice for DJD vol. 6, and collaborating on a more recent edition in 1999 as part of Princeton Theological Seminary’s DSS project. Newsom’s insight of a chiastic structure to the 13 songs and her conception of them as a set of mystical texts that reflect on the nature of the heavenly temple and an angelic priesthood remain at the center of research on the Sabbath Sacrifice.
Newsom’s other research has focused on issues of moral formation within the Hebrew Bible wisdom tradition and the Qumran sect. For example, her influential article on discourse about women in Proverbs 1–9 shines a light on the role gendered discourse has on shaping symbolic worlds within culture; in this case, the marginal woman is both symbolic of the chaotic and dangerous (the strange woman) but also lends itself to being the barrier between chaos and order (woman wisdom).