Succeeding Alain Prochiantz, Thomas Römer has just taken over as head of the prestigious Collège de France.
Thomas Römer, new administrator of the Collège de France.
Since September 1, 2019, Professor Thomas Römer has become the new administrator of the Collège de France, in Paris. Holder of the "Biblical backgrounds" chair since 2007, this internationally renowned Swiss researcher has been dissecting the writings of the Old Testament for more than forty years to better decode the keys to their reading. It looks for the oldest layers, deciphers them, detects additions or modifications and highlights inconsistencies.
A philological analysis and archaeological excavations
"I try to make people understand how the biblical text was constructed in response to the historical, political, theological and social circumstances of its time" , he likes to say. A text that he approaches like any major document. Doctor honoris causa from the University of Tel Aviv (Israel), Thomas Römer has been a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres since 2016.
His philological and literary analysis of the texts is also accompanied, - thus dialoguing with the history of the ancient Near East -, by participation in archaeological excavations. Thus recently, Sciences et Avenir accompanied Thomas Römer to Israel on the site of Kiriath Yearim, near Abu Gosh, northwest of Jerusalem, where the mythical Ark of the Covenant could have stayed for twenty years, on these hills dominating the lands of Judea. A report to rediscover in its entirety in the magazine Sciences et Avenir January 2019 issue 863.