Notes on the Contributors

“Notes on the Contributors,” in The Temple in Antiquity: Ancient Records and Modern Perspectives, ed. Truman G. Madsen (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1984), 191–95.

Truman G. Madsen

Truman G. Madsen is Richard L. Evans Endowed Professor at Brigham Young University, Director of the Judaeo-Christian Studies Center, and Professor of Philosophy. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Utah and Harvard University, where he completed his studies in the philosophy and history of religion. He has been guest professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California; at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts; and at Haifa University in Israel. He has authored volumes on the philosophy of religion, ethics, and language, and also a biography of Mormon historian B. H. Roberts. In the Religious Studies Monograph Series he has edited two volumes, Reflections on Mormonism and Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless, and has contributed essays to two more, Deity and Death and The Words of Joseph Smith.

Hugh W. Nibley

Hugh W. Nibley is Professor Emeritus of History and Religion at Brigham Young University. For a time he was Director of the Institute of Ancient Studies. His graduate study in history was begun at UCLA, and his Ph.D. is from the University of California at Berkeley. An expert in Semitic languages, he has devoted two decades to the study of world ritual and has written several volumes based upon the approach of “patternism,” one on the Middle East and one on Egypt; presently he is preparing a work on the rituals of Greco-Roman times. He has published several articles on the ancient temple, including “Christian Envy of the Temple,” Jewish Quarterly Review L (1959): 97–123, and L (1960): 229–40; and “Treasures in the Heavens: Some Early Christian Insights into the Organizing of the Worlds,” Dialogue VIII (Autumn/Winter 1974): 76–98. The first of Dr. Nibley’s two chapters in the present volume was originally published as “The Idea of the Temple in History,” Millennial Star 120 (August 1958): 228–37, 247–49.

John M. Lundquist

John M. Lundquist teaches in Religious Education and in Anthropology at Brigham Young University. His Ph.D. is in Near Eastern studies from the University of Michigan. He is director of the North Orontes Valley expedition in Syria, and is coeditor of Archaeological Reports from the Tabqa Dam Project-Euphrates Valley, Syria. He contributed “What Is a Temple? A Preliminary Typology” to The Quest for the Kingdom of God: Studies in Honor of George Mendenhall (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1982), and “The Legitimizing Role of the Temple in the Origin of the State” to Society of Biblical Literature 1982 Seminar Papers, ed. Kent Harold Richards (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, Society of Biblical Literature, 1982), no. 21.

Mitchell J. Dahood

Only weeks after his last appearance at BYU, Mitchell Dahood died suddenly in Rome in March 1982. He was Professor of Ugaritic and Phoenician Languages and Literature at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He studied at Boston College and at Johns Hopkins University, writing his dissertation on Canaanite-Phoenician influence on Qoheleth. He taught as guest professor at Yale University, was president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, and in 1980 delivered the Haskell Lectures at Oberlin College. He was the author of three volumes on the Psalms in the Anchor Bible series published by Doubleday (1966, 1968, 1970). He also authored more than two hundred articles on the linguistic and biblical relevance of the Tell Mardikh discoveries in Syria, and he contributed a lengthy article on these texts to the recent volume by the Italian archaeologist Giovanni Pettinato, The Archives of Ebla (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981).

Frank Moore Cross Jr.

Frank Moore Cross, Jr., is Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard University and curator of the Harvard Semitic Museum. He studied at Johns Hopkins under William F. Albright. He has received grants and fellowships with the American School of Oriental Research, Jerusalem Hebrew College, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as an editor of the Biblical Archaeologist and Harvard Theological Review. His work on the tabernacle in ancient Israel is considered a definitive advance over traditional understanding. His contributions to the technical analysis of the Hebrew language are world-renowned. He is considered one of the most authoritative voices in contemporary interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He has written and lectured extensively on the literature and culture of the biblical world, being at home in both archaeological and linguistic studies.

Richard J. Clifford

Richard J. Clifford is Associate Professor of Old Testament at the Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He studied at Boston College and Weston College, and at Harvard he completed his Ph.D. under Frank Moore Cross, Jr., concentrating in Hebrew and the Bible. More than once he has returned to Harvard as a guest lecturer. His published articles include “The Temple in the Ugaritic Myth of Baal,” in Symposia Celebrating the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1900–1975), ed. Frank Moore Cross (Cambridge, Mass.: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1979). He has also authored the book that is the background of the present paper, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).

Jacob Milgrom

Jacob Milgrom is Professor of Near East Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He studied at Brooklyn College and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. He has received the Goldman Award and grants-in-aid from the American Philosophical Society and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Cult and Conscience and Studies in Levitical Terminology. His work on the Temple Scroll, the longest of those discovered near the Dead Sea, has made him the prime authority in America on this scroll and the classic Hebrew study of it by Yigael Yadin. The summary analysis of the scroll is published in “The Temple Scroll,” Biblical Archaeologist 41 (1978): 105–20.

Carol L. Meyers

Carol L. Meyers is Associate Professor of Biblical History at Duke University and was associate director of Meiron excavations in Israel. Her Ph.D. is from Brandeis University, and she has done postdoctoral study at the University of Michigan. Her thesis on the tabernacle menorah, a study of the origins and symbolic implications of that temple furnishing, has been published in the American Schools of Oriental Research Series (No. 2; Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1976). Her temple-related work includes The Tabernacle Menorah (ASOR Publications, Monograph Series, 1976); “Was There a Seven Branched Lamp-stand in Solomon’s Temple?” Biblical Archaeological Review 5 (1979); and “The Elusive Temple,” Biblical Archaeologist 45 (1982). Dr. Meyers’s chapter first appeared in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly 45 (1983): 167–78, and is here reprinted by the gracious permission of Joseph Fitzmeyer.

Shaye J. D. Cohen

Shaye J. D. Cohen is Associate Professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He earned a master of arts degree from both Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and a bachelor of arts from Yeshiva University, where he majored in Greek and Latin. His Ph.D. is from Columbia. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled him to teach an Institute on Post-Biblical Foundations. He is a member of the Association of Jewish Studies, the Society of Biblical Literature, and other learned societies. His book, Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian, was published by E. J. Brill in 1979. He has also published several articles on Jewish history, especially in the Greco-Roman period.

George MacRae

George MacRae is Stillmann Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, a member of the Society of Jesus since 1948, and an ordained priest since 1960. He has taught at Fairfield University, the University of Connecticut, the Weston School of Theology, and Boston College. He has received awards from the Catholic Biblical Association, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Most recently he has been rector of the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Research at Tentur, Jerusalem. He is a recognized authority on the Coptic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, and has done significant translations and analyses of these codices relating them to traditional understanding of the New Testament and Gnosticism.