Mitchell Dahood 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 archeologist Giovanni Pettinato, The Archives of Ebla (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981). Only weeks after his last appearance at BYU, Mitchell Dahood died suddenly in Rome in March 1982.