Kenneth Bergland did his MA in the history of ideas at the University of Oslo, where he wrote his thesis on the concept of ‘the other’ in German and French philosophies of the 20th century. He was a Visiting Graduate Student at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. In his Ph.D. thesis from Andrews University, now published as Reading as a Disclosure of the Thoughts of the Heart (Harrassowitz, 2019), he wrote on the reuse of the Torah in the Prophets. He argues that this reuse is characterized by a close and simultaneously expansionistic reading. A governing question for him in life has been “how should we then live?”
Bergland has worked over a decade as a pastor in Norway, with responsibilities as a church pastor, for evangelistic training of youth, work among immigrants and students, and rural ministry. He is one of the organizers of the ongoing international research project “Exploring the Composition of the Pentateuch” at Andrews University. He joined the AIIAS faculty in 2022.
His research interests are literary reuse, hermeneutics, Pentateuch, eschatology, divine revelation and hiddenness, ethics and philosophy of life and the history of ideas in biblical perspectives. His wife Marianne and daughter Asne help him to remember where life first and foremost needs to be lived.
Bergland published his dissertation Reading as a Disclosure of the Thoughts of the Heart (Harrassowitz) in 2019. He was a co-editor of Exploring the Composition of the Pentateuch (Eisenbrauns), 2020), and is the co-editor of a second forthcoming volume by the same title.
