Ellen van Wolde


Ellen José van Wolde is a Dutch biblical scholar. She is Full Professor of Old Testament Exegesis
and Source Texts of Judaism at Radboud University Nijmegen.
Van Wolde studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, and the University of Bologna. In 2005 she was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2011, she became a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion.
Van Wolde is known for her view that in the Genesis creation narrative, the Hebrew verb bara does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate", and that "the traditional view of God the Creator" is now untenable, since "the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals." In 2017 she published Separation and Creation In Genesis 1 and Psalm 104, a Continuation of the Discussion of bara, in which she lists, expands and substantiates arguments for the meaning of bara as separate.
In 2009 her book Reframing Biblical Studies. When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition, and Context was published in which she explained her method of analysis.
In 2016, together with physicist Klaas Landsman, she compiled a book about the role of coincidence in science: The Challenge of Chance. A Multidisciplinary Approach from Science and the Humanities

Some recent papers