Benjamin Suchard is a historical linguist specialized in the languages of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament, Tanakh): Hebrew and Aramaic. His research focuses on the history of these languages and the texts that are written in them as well as the prehistory of the Semitic language family as a whole.

More information about Benjamin Suchard

Fields of interest

• Aramaic
• Ancient Hebrew
• Comparative Semitics
• Hebrew Bible

Grants and awards

• 2023: Cuijpers-Opdenakker Annual Prize (Netherlands Institute for the Near East & Ex Oriente Lux), best article on the Ancient Near East written by a junior scholar in the Netherlands, for ‘The Greek in Daniel 3: code-switching, not loanwords’.
• 2019: Innovational Research Incentives Scheme Veni, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
• 2019: Senior postdoctoral fellowship, Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).
• 2017: Postdoctoral grant, Stichting Studiecentrum voor Judaïca en Hebraica Dr L. Fuks.

Curriculum vitae

• 2026-present: University Lecturer in Aramaic, Leiden University.
• 2026-2030 Postdoctoral researcher on the project 'From Aleph to Alpha: The spread and development of alphabetic writing across the Mediterranean', Leiden University.
• 2026 (spring) Lecturer in Aramaic, Leiden University.
• 2025 Postdoctoral researcher on the AlUla Inscriptions Corpus Analysis Project (AICAP), Ghent University.
• 2019-2020, 2022-2025 Senior postdoctoral fellow, project: ‘But They Could Not Read the Writing: The Biblical Aramaic consonantal text, its reading tradition and their mutual interaction’, KU Leuven.
• 2019-2022 Postdoctoral researcher, project: ‘Nabataean Aramaic and Pre-Islamic Arabic’, Leiden University.
• 2017-2018 Postdoctoral researcher, project: ‘The origins of the Biblical Aramaic reading tradition’, Leiden University.
• 2016-2018 Lecturer in Linguistics and Hebrew & Aramaic, Leiden University.
• 2012-2016 PhD candidate in Linguistics, dissertation: 'The development of the Biblical Hebrew vowels', supervised by H. Gzella and A.M. Lubotsky, Leiden University.
• 2010-2012 Research MA in Linguistics, Leiden University.
• 2009-2010 Propaedeutic diploma in Philosophy, Leiden University.
• 2007-2010 
• BA in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, Leiden University.

Key publications

• 'Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic'. Transactions of the Philological Society 124.1 (2026), 240-256.
• 'What can Nabataean Aramaic tell us about Pre-Islamic Arabic?' Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 34.1 (2023), 158-172.
• Aramaic Daniel: A textual reconstruction of Chapters 1-7. Studia Semitica Neerlandica 73. 2022; Leiden: Brill.
• 'The origins of the Biblical Aramaic reading tradition.' Vetus Testamentum 71 (2021), 105-119.
• The development of the Biblical Hebrew vowels. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 99. 2019; Leiden: Brill.

Publications