BRiefs

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H. Neil Richardson 1916–1988

H. Neil Richardson, biblical scholar and archaeologist, died on December 19, 1988, after a brief period in the hospital, following a long illness.

Richardson grew up in Washington State and graduated from the University of Puget Sound. He earned his Bachelor of Sacred Theology and Ph.D. degrees at Boston University. From 1945 to 1957 he was an associate professor of Bible and religion at Syracuse University. He served as annual professor and then director of the American Schools of Oriental Research (now W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research) in Jerusalem during the years 1956–1958. In 1957 he was appointed to the faculty of the Boston University School of Theology, where he taught Old Testament studies until his retirement in 1981.

Since writing his dissertation in 1951 on “Ugaritic Parallels to the Old Testament,” Richardson retained a lifelong interest in Ugaritic. In his last years he delved into the Ebla archive. His articles over four decades range from archaeological reports and surveys, to epigraphical and philological notes, to essays on aspects of biblical theology. Richardson particularly loved the Book of Amos, on which he wrote a series of articles in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as “Amos’s Four Visions—Of Judgment and Hope,” which appears in this issue of BR. His most recent publications were a study of Psalm 106 (in the Marvin Pope festschrift, Love and Death in the Ancient Near East [1987]), and “The Old Testament Background of Jesus as Begotten of God,” BR 02:03. He contributed to The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary on the Bible and to Bible dictionaries, and also wrote adult education literature for the Methodist church.

Neil Richardson began his archaeological work as an area supervisor at Dhiban in 1952, and subsequently participated in numerous excavations: at Jericho with Kathleen Kenyon in the fifties and sixties, at Cyprus (Idalion) in the seventies and at Tel Dor in Israel in the eighties. His devotion to field work brought him to Dor each summer from the time of his retirement in 1981 until one year before his death. During that time, Richardson directed Richdor, the program that attracted and arranged for American volunteers to dig at Dor. A fine photographer, he used this skill effectively in the field.

Richardson held several offices (including that of president) in the former National Association of Biblical Instructors, and was twice president of the Alumni and Friends of the American Schools of Oriental Research. He was an ordained United Methodist minister who served churches in Washington State, Massachussetts and New York in the 1940s and 1950s. A man of deep faith and ethical convictions, who practiced what he believed, Richardson was a conscientious objector in World War II and an active participant in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. He loved his work as a scholar and teacher, and is remembered with appreciation by those who studied with him. He is survived by his wife, Faith, and three daughters.

Oldest Complete Book of Psalms Discovered

A cemetery for the poor has yielded a biblical treasure at an excavation about 85 miles up the Nile from Cairo, Egypt. The discovery is a copy of the biblical Book of Psalms—the oldest complete version ever found, and possibly the world’s oldest complete book. Unearthed from the grave of a girl who was approximately 12 years old at death, the volume consists of about 500 parchment pages bound in 32 quires between leather-stitched wooden covers. (A quire is a group of sheets that are folded in half to form pages and placed one atop another to be sewn together.)

The handwritten text employs the Coptic script, a form of writing once used by the Copts, Egypt’s Christian sect that traces its origins to St. Mark and its independence to the split from the Orthodox Church in 451. This script combines ancient Greek characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Scholars 005identify the text’s language as the Oxyrhynchus dialect of Coptic, the Copts’ extinct language. The site of Oxyrhynchus, the Greco-Roman city that gave the dialect its name, lies just 25 miles south of the excavation where the book was found.

Gawdat Gabra, the director of Cairo’s Coptic Museum, has been studying the book since it discovery in 1984, but his conclusions have been only recently publicized outside of academia. As the result of paleographic research—a dating technique, more accurate than carbon dating, in which the forms of the script’s letters are compared to examples from dated manuscripts of various periods—Gabra concludes that the book dates to the second half of the fourth century, “probably closer to the year 400 than the year 350.” Martin Krause, professor of Coptic studies at Münster University (West Germany), has collaborated with Gabra in the study of the book and agrees that it is “the earliest [complete] Book of Psalms.”

Whether this Psalter is the world’s oldest extant book, however, is a more difficult question, Other contenders for the title are the Codex Vaticanus, in the Vatican Library, and the Codex Sinaiticus, in the British Museum, Some scholars have dated these to the middle of the fourth century, but others, wary of such precise claims, label them simply “fourth century.”

The ancient Copts often buried some valued object with their dead. How such a valuable item as this Psalter came to be buried in the grave of an impoverished girl, however, remains a mystery.

H. Neil Richardson 1916–1988

H. Neil Richardson, biblical scholar and archaeologist, died on December 19, 1988, after a brief period in the hospital, following a long illness.