Godfrey Rolles Driver
Godfrey Rolles Driver | |
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Born | 20 August 1892 |
Died | 22 April 1975 (aged 82) |
Parent(s) | |
Awards |
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Position held | chairperson (Society for Old Testament Study, 1938–), chairperson (International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, 1953–1959) |
Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver
Life
Driver was born in Oxford, England, son of the noted English biblical scholar Samuel Rolles Driver, and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, (1911–1915) where he won the Pusey and Ellerton and Senior Kennicott Hebrew Scholarships and the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose (1913) and for Greek verse (1916).
After serving in World War I, with tasks as varied as hospital work, postal censorship, and intelligence, in 1919, he was named fellow and classical tutor in Magdalen College, Oxford. He remained at Oxford for his entire career, ultimately as Professor of Semitic Philology, and produced a steady stream of scholarly articles on subjects including vocabulary of the Old Testament, and words and texts in the Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Syriac languages.
From 1937 to 1938 Driver was the president of the
He directed the translation of the Old Testament for the New English Bible from its inception in 1949, completed and first published in 1970. He was
Selected works
- Letters of the first Babylonian dynasty, OECT III, 1925.
- Studies in Cappadocian Tablets, Paris, 1927.
- Semitic Writing: From Pictograph to Alphabet, 1948 (Schweich Lecturesfor 1944).
- The Babylonian Laws, with J. C. Miles, Oxford, 1952–1955.
- Aramaic Documents of the Fifth Century B.C., Oxford, 1954 (Abridged and Revised edition 1957).
- Canaanite Myths and Legends, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956.
- The Judaean scrolls: The problem and a solution, Oxford: Blackwell, 1965.
References
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
- ^ Emerton 2016, pp. 345.
- ^ "Sir G.R. Driver (Obituary)". 1976. Retrieved 4 March 2023.
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Sources
- S2CID 177082336.
- CDLI Wiki.
- F.F. Bruce, Godfrey Rolles Driver (1892–1975), The Witness, 105, No. 1255, pp. 266–267 (July 1975).
- Emerton, J. A. (19 January 2016). Driver, Godfrey Rolles, 1892-1975. pp. 344–362. ISBN 978-0-19-725983-2.