Yochanan Muffs

Muffs married Yocheved Herschlag in 1970. He succumbed to Parkinson's disease, from which he suffered for many decades.

Muffs made major contributions in biblical studies, Semitic languages, the history of the ancient Near East, and Jewish religion and thought. He strove to reach an understanding of biblical text through comparative philological study. His first book, Studies in the Aramaic Legal Papyri from Elephantine, published in 1969, has been described as a "watershed work." Muffs analyzed legal documents from a colony of Jewish families in fifth century BCE, using comparative evidence from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Jewish and other legal sources to further understanding of life in those days. David Hartman, founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, described Muffs as a "master of midrashic analysis whose rich theological imagination reveals the gripping realism of the biblical God and the intensity of God's relationship to human history." In Love and Joy: Law, Language and Religion in Ancient Israel, Muffs writes about the core task of the prophet in the Israelite tradition: The Israelite prophet is given explicit directions from God, but is also "an independent advocate...attempting to mitigate the severity of the decree." In his review of The Personhood of God, Bishop Krister Stendahl of Harvard Divinity School says the book "embraces unashamedly the ways the Bible pictures God as a person with all the traits of human psychology and even anatomy...and shows convincingly how it enriches both faith and theology, not least by liberating the readers from the stultifying literal readings of the sacred texts."

Muffs grew up in a Conservative Jewish home in Flushing, Queens. His parents were Barney and Mary Muffs. Muffs had one sister, Civia, an artist. He did his undergraduate degree in Humanities at Queens College and studied for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he began teaching in 1954. He pursued his Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Yochanan Muffs (June 3, 1932 - December 6, 2009) was an American professor of the Bible and religion at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.