Background

I joined the faculty of the FSU Religion Department in Fall 2005. I offer courses in Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism. I completed an M.T.S degree in 1997 at Harvard Divinity School and I finished my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2002. I studied under John Collins and wrote a dissertation on 4QInstruction, the longest wisdom text of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This document is the best example available of a sapiential text with an apocalyptic worldview. Working on this composition developed my interest in the intersections between the wisdom and apocalyptic traditions in early Judaism. 

Recent Conferences

Prof. Goff is co-hosted with Prof. Joseph Hellweg the 2021-22 Southeastern Regional SBL.AAR meeting.  For more information about this meeting, see here https://religion.fsu.edu/conference

Recent Books

• Co-editor, with Samuel Adams and Greg Schmidt Goering, Sirach and its Contexts: The Pursuit of Wisdom and Human Flourishing. JSJSup 196. Leiden: Brill, 2021. 
• Co-editor, with Stefan Beyerle, Notions of Time in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021.  
• Co-editor, with Dylan Burns, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices. Leiden: Brill, 2022 ("Open Access publication").

Recent Articles

• “When Monsters Walked the Earth: Giants, Monster Theory, and the Reformulation of Textual Traditions in the Enochic Book of the Watchers,” Journal of Gods and Monsters 2 (2021): 39-57. 
• “Deep Time, the Monstrous, and the Book of the Watchers in the Hellenistic Age,” in Notions of Time in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature.
• “It Didn’t Happen the Way Moses Said It Did: Exegesis, Creativity, and Enochic Traditions in the Apocryphon of John,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices.
• “Effaced and Naturalized Modes of Jewish Reading: The Judah and Tamar Story (Genesis 38), the Book of Jubilees, and Robert Alter,” in Understanding Texts in Early Judaism: Studies on Biblical, Qumran, Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature in Memory of Géza Xeravits (ed. József Zsengellér; DCLS 48; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), 45-60.
• “A Devilish Parallel: Sir 15:14 in its Hebrew Reception,” in Ben Sira in Conversation with Traditions: A Festschrift for Prof. Núria Calduch-Benages on the Occasion of Her 65th Birthday (ed. Francis Macatangay and Francisco-Javier Ruiz-Ortiz; DCLS 47; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), 267-82.  

Research and Teaching Specializations

• Wisdom Literature 
• Apocalypticism 
• The Dead Sea Scrolls 
• Second Temple Judaism

Courses

Fall 2023

• REL2210: Introduction to the Old Testament
• REL3293: Apocalypse Then & Now

Spring 2023

• REL4203/RLG5204: Classical Hebrew Texts 
• RLG6298: Hebrew Bible Proseminar