| David Noel Freedman | |||||||||||||||
| Birth Name: | Noel Freedman | ||||||||||||||
| Birth Date: | 12 May 1922 | ||||||||||||||
| Birth Place: | New York City, US | ||||||||||||||
| Death Place: | Petaluma, California, US | ||||||||||||||
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David Noel Freedman (May 12, 1922 – April 8, 2008) was an American biblical scholar, author, editor, archaeologist, and, after his conversion from Judaism, a Presbyterian minister. He was one of the first Americans to work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is the son of the writer David Freedman. He died of a heart ailment.[1]
Freedman was born Noel Freedman in New York City on May 12, 1922, the son of David and Beatrice Freedman. The elder Freedman died in 1936 and Noel adopted his name as a mark of respect. Soon after, he converted to Christianity and became a member of the Presbyterian Church. The New York times misidentified Noel as a girl in David Freedman's obituary.[2]
He attended the City College of New York and he earned his B.A., after which he entered Princeton Theological Seminary, where he earned a Bachelor of Theology degree in 1944.[3] He then went on to study Semitic Languages and Literature at The Johns Hopkins University. In 1947, while he was still a graduate student, the excavation of caves near the Dead Sea was just beginning to unearth thousands of fragments of texts. He became one of the first American scholars to get access and spent twenty years painstakingly studying and translating a scroll of Leviticus, one of the books of the Torah.[4] After earning his doctorate in 1948, he then held a series of professorial and administrative positions at various theological institutions and universities.
As the general editor of several distinguished series, including the Anchor Bible Series (1956–2008), Eerdmans Critical Commentaries (2000–08), and The Bible in Its World (2000–08), and as the editor and author of numerous other award-winning volumes, including the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000), Freedman has produced over three hundred and thirty scholarly books. Recent seminal works as an author include The Unity of the Hebrew Bible (1991), Psalm 119: The Exaltation of Torah (1999), The Nine Commandments (2000) and What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls and Why Do They Matter? (2007). As editor of the Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition (1998), Freedman and his colleagues brought the world's oldest complete Hebrew Bible to synagogues, churches, libraries and individuals around the world for the first time in history.
In 1995, a Festschrift was published in his honor. Fortunate the Eyes That See: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Seventieth Birthday included contributions from Francis Andersen, Adele Berlin, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Baruch Halpern, Gary Knoppers, and Choon-Leong Seow.
Freedman died on April 8, 2008.