Sergey Panfilov

What I do. I am a PhD student in biblical studies, working in biblical theology and exegesis. My main texts are the Pentateuch and Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and Hebrews and Revelation in the New Testament. From them I work toward biblical theology and, for pastors and churches, toward the hermeneutics of contextualization.

From mathematics to biblical studies. I trained as a mathematician at Moscow State University and spent twenty years designing and integrating enterprise software: for Parsons and Dell in Moscow, then for banks, publishers, and industrial companies across Scandinavia, the last five years through my own consultancy. Fourteen of those years were in Norway, where I became a citizen. Throughout that time I studied and taught the Bible, as I had since 1994. In 2020 I made it my profession.

Study. After graduate courses in Biblical Greek and Hebrew at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo, I came to Andrews University in 2022 and am now a permanent resident of the United States. I completed an MA in Religion with a thesis on Zechariah 3:9 and began a PhD in Old Testament with a New Testament cognate in 2024. I work in Biblical Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Akkadian, and Ugaritic, and I am learning Modern Hebrew through Jerusalem-based online programs.

What I build. At the university’s Center for Biblical Learning and Computing, my software years turned out to be preparation. With colleagues in the United States and Europe, I train machine-learning models to recognize the syntax of the Septuagint and help build open datasets that connect it with the Hebrew text.