Hayim ben Yosef Tawil received his PhD from Columbia University and served as a Professor at Yeshiva University in New York. He is the author of An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew (2009); The Rose and the Thorns (1997), a narrative about the Yemeni Jews of early modern Jerusalem; Operation Esther: Opening the Door for the Last Jews of Yemen (1998); and The Crown of Aleppo: The Mystery of the Oldest Hebrew Bible Codex (2010), which received a National Jewish Book Award.