Prof. Joseph Lam is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept (Oxford University Press, 2016) as well as a number of scholarly articles in the fields of Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic studies. His research interests include ritual and cult in the ancient Near East, metaphor in religious language, and the philological study of Hebrew and other Semitic languages.