Saturday, October 20, 2012

More on Frank Cross

THE NEW YORK TIMES has published an obituary for Frank Cross: Frank Moore Cross, Biblical Scholar, Dies at 91.
“When you walked into his classes, you felt you were on the frontier of knowledge in the field,” said Peter Machinist, who studied under Dr. Cross as an undergraduate at Harvard and now holds the endowed professorship there that Dr. Cross had held until his retirement in 1992. “Whatever happened in the field would come to him first, before it got published, because people wanted to know what he thought.”
Regarding the photo, I was working at the Ashkelon dig when the bowl he was looking at was discovered (it bore a Phoenician inscription) and I remember him out in the field in that shirt.

Other tributes to Professor Cross have been published by Hershel Shanks (The End of an Era: Frank Moore Cross (1921-2012), BAR) and by Jonathan Rosenbaum, another of his students (Frank Moore Cross: An Appreciation, ASOR Blog). And Chuck Jones has collected some bibliography at AWOL: Frank Moore Cross in JSTOR.

Background here.