Frank Moore Cross

Career From 1949 to 1950 Cross was a junior instructor in Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins University. He was subsequently an instructor in biblical history at Wellesley College from 1950 to 1951, an instructor in Old Testament at McCormick Theological Seminary 1951 to 1953, and an associate professor at the same institution from 1954 to 1957.

Cross was appointed associate professor in Old Testament at Harvard Divinity School in 1957. One year later, he was appointed Harvard University's Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages, the third oldest university chair in the United States. He would hold this position from 1958 to 1992, then becoming Hancock Professor Emeritus. Cross was curator of the Harvard Semitic Museum from 1958 to 1961 and director of the museum from 1974 to 1987.

Cross was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (1971–1972) and a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1978–1979). He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961), a member of the Catholic Biblical Association (1968), and a member of the American Philosophical Society (1971).

During his tenure at Harvard, Cross supervised more than a hundred dissertations, with the result that many of today's senior scholars in Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern studies are his former students. Among the most prominent of these are Emanuel Tov, John J. Collins, Jo Ann Hackett, John Huehnergard, William G. Dever, P. Kyle McCarter Jr., Peter Machinist, Lawrence Stager, Bruce Waltke, Richard Elliott Friedman, Hector Avalos, and Mark S. Smith.

Dead Sea Scrolls Beginning June 1953, Cross was a member of the international committee responsible for editing the Dead Sea Scrolls, which had been discovered at Qumran. Cross first heard of the scrolls in late 1948 while a student at Johns Hopkins University, when he was shown pictures of the Isaiah Scroll by Albright, who would later nominate Cross to the Scrolls' editorial team. On joining the team he was immediately allocated 61 biblical manuscripts from Cave 4 at Qumran to prepare for publication. Initially, this involved cleaning the manuscripts in the Palestine Archaeological Museum where they were being worked on in the "Scrollery". As with several others on the team, Cross was financially supported between 1954 and 1960 by a John D Rockefeller subsidy. Cross was one of only two American scholars on the scroll-publication team, and he has since been recognized as a founder of Qumran studies. His general introduction to the topic is The Ancient Library of Qumran, the third edition of which was published in 1995.

Death Cross died in Rochester, New York, in October 2012 after a long illness. He was 91.

Honors and awards In 1980, Cross received the Percia Schimmel Prize in Archaeology from the Israel Museum and the William Foxwell Albright Award in Biblical Scholarship. In 1991 he was awarded the Medalla de Honor de la Universidad Complutense (University of Madrid), the Gratz College Centennial Award in 1998 and a Lifetime Award in Textual Studies from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in 2004.

Cross was an honorary member of the Israel Exploration Society and the British Society for Old Testament Study. He was a trustee of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1973–1991), and an honorary trustee from 1991; a trustee of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (1979–1996) and a lifetime honorary trustee from 1997; and a trustee of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation since 1992.

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