David Noel Freedman: A Deep Appreciation (1922-2008)

Edward F. Campbell, Jr.

What adjectives jump to mind as one absorbs the news that David Noel Freedman has died at the age of 85 at the home of his son David and daughter-in-law Genevieve in Petaluma, CA? What describes the fact that he and son David were planning on the eve of his death how to take his program of Hebrew Bible interpretation to “Webdom” for wide dissemination? Will “incomparable” do? “Indefatigable?” At least those, and many more.

On the day we all learned of Noel’s death, a seminary friend of mine sent on to me his 31-page set of notes on a conference held at Wayne State University in mid-May of 1959, arranged by A. Spiro and peopled by W. F. Albright, H. L. Ginsberg, E. A. Speiser, D. N. Freedman, G. E. Mendenhall, J. L. McKenzie, and F. M. Cross. This “Babette’s Feast” of a conference ranged from Mosaic beginnings through the voices of the prophets, on into the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. Here are two Freedman contributions (paraphrased):

• What I’m after is not the concept of monotheism but rather to discover what is distinctive about the religion of Moses – and I nominate the themes of covenant between deity and people, of direct revelation, of the primacy of God and the absence of intermediation between God and the people of God.
• The remarkable nexus of divine commitment and human obligation determines the focus of the prophets, who spoke with one essential voice.

These themes became subjects of Noel’s writing and teaching in the heyday of that still- honorable biblical theology period, and represent one of the many threads that knit

Noel into one incredibly talented person.

How did ASOR fit into all of this? Noel represented the (Albrightian) conviction that one must tie all the methods of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies together and should participate in them all. Doing so would involve the combined effort of a widely heterogeneous group of scholars, because if they would all search for data properly they would come to a coherent panorama of at least bumpy consistency. So Noel practiced everything. He got dirt under his fingernails at Ashdod, and gave 100-slide lectures about that site, somehow keeping to one hour. He served as director of the ASOR Jerusalem/Albright Institute in 1969-70 and 1976-77, with flair. Sy Gitin reports the possibly apocryphal Freedman maneuver that got the dusty driveway there paved, when the Trustees said “No!” He got it paved as of the day his appointment ended, and then stuck the Trustees with the bill.

Noel edited BASOR in 1974-1978, and BA from 1976-82, practicing his capacity to push people on deadlines, to coddle them when they delayed, and eventually to bring out good work from the joint effort. Together he and I got out three volumes of reprints from BA and had fun doing it. His name is linked with many another colleague as co-author or co-editor on dozens of publications; that is the way Noel loved to work. Working with him was always an adventure, because he popped new ideas as he went along, until he finally insisted “enough is enough, get it done.” Sometimes his mind worked too fast, as in his treatment of the Ebla texts, but “indefatigable” as he was, he weathered the fall-out and started on something else.

So much more to note: Noel taught at theological seminaries and universities, sometimes with overlapping appointments. He stimulated students and colleagues at the University of Michigan, at the University of California at San Diego, at the Presbyterian seminaries Western (that became Pittsburgh) and San Francisco, at GTU Berkeley, and at all the many places where he gave delightful lectures. Perhaps, however, his most noteworthy publication effort was to edit reference works portraying the state of our “field-encompassing” field), yielding The Anchor Bible Dictionary (six volumes) and the Anchor Bible, now up to 84 volumes and ongoing. Here he and Albright embodied the dream implicit in that Wayne State conference of 1959, with Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and free-thinking participants. His editing work on these was by no means superficial: I’ll not forget receiving 70 pages of Noelisms after I sent him my “finished” manuscript on Ruth for the AB, many of his observations finding their way into the final submission.

And yet more: he had an innate sense of the literary beauty of the Bible and married it to his outstanding feel for Hebrew prosody and poetry, especially at UCSD. There he nurtured a new wave of younger scholars, who to a person speak of what it meant to have Noel cooperating with them. He was incomparable as a teammate. Ask William Propp, Tom Levy, Richard Elliot Friedman, and many another.

Incomparable in scope, indefatigable in effort, a genial man always thinking creatively but looking for allies to think with him – we will encounter few in our lives like David Noel Freedman. Godspeed, good friend.