Prof. Ran Zadok is the world's leading expert in ancient Near Eastern population groups in the first millennium. Over the past decades, he assembled almost single handed the cuneiform data concerned with Judeans, Israelites, and other West Semitic ethnic groups. The results of his studies are published in numerous monographs and articles. Prof. Zadok's achievement in the field of Assyrian and Babylonian population groups and onomastics remains unparalleled in the field of ancient Near Eastern Studies by virtue of his vast collection of data, following the transliteration and translation of over 3000 cuneiform tablets, many of which are as yet unpublished.

Prof. Yoram Cohen has studied the archives of the city of Emar. By forming the Emar Online Database, he established together with co-researcher Dr. d'Alfonso (University of Konstanz, Germany) the city's chronology which is relevant to our understanding of the end of the Late Bronze Age. Dr. Cohen brings to the current project his expertise in the study of ancient archives and the construction of large-scale computerized projects.

Prof. Kathleen Abraham specializes in the socio-economic history of Babylonia in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods. She has extensively studied the archives of several Babylonian families and reconstructed from the documents that were held in these archives the families' economic profile and social network. In her books and articles she gives a lively picture of how these Babylonian families built up their wealth, developed strategies to maintain or expend their wealth, and nurtured links with the local priestly or political establishment. Her publication of two of the Āl Yāhūdu tablets for the first time, a marriage contract and an inheritance contract involving parties of Judean descent, elaborates on the Judean versus local Babylonian marriage practices, the living conditions of immigrant families in Babylonia and the process of their linguistic and economic assimilation.