Grace Park received her BA in Chinese Language and Literature from Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea) in 1997. After teaching Chinese for a year, she moved to Israel to pursue her MA in The Bible and the Ancient Near East at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which she completed in 2001. She received her PhD in Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitics at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011, with a thesis on the syntax of grammatical particles in Biblical Hebrew, which she is currently revising for publication.

Dr. Park’s work focuses on the analysis of Biblical Hebrew combining recent linguistic theory with careful philological investigation. Her dissertation reanalyzes the so-called compound particle kî ’im using a new analytical schema that provides a unified analysis of these  constructions and highlights the role of kî ’im in orchestrating contrastive focus. Recently she has analyzed kî and ’ašer in Biblical Hebrew as nominalizers on the basis of a typological model that derives from a recent, wide-ranging study of nominalization in non-Western languages, in particular those of Central and East Asia (forthcoming in Journal of Semitic Studies and Hebrew Studies, respectively). Moreover, she has proposed a new analysis of oath formulae in which the ’im clause acts as a rhetorical question rather than the protasis of an elided self-curse (“Polar im in Oaths and the Question of Literacy in Lachish 3,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 125:3, 2013).

She is also investigating scribal education in ancient Israel in the context of ancient Near East. Her work in this area began with her translation of William Schniedewind’s How the Bible Became a Book into Korean in 2006, but subsequently grew into an undergraduate seminar (“The Origins of Education in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia”) that she designed and taught at UCLA in 2009. She has been a guest lecturer in Ugaritic at UFS and will be teaching a seminar on Ugaritic ritual texts at Freie Universität Berlin in 2014.