[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 91 (Wednesday, June 25, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Page S6381]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             MARVIN H. POPE

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, our age has lost a scholar of 
epic achievement and range with the passing of Marvin H. Pope of the 
Yale Divinity School. A Biblical scholar of unsurpassed originality and 
range, he died at age 80 in the First Church of Round Hill, Greenwich, 
CT, just after he and his wife Ingrid had read a passage from the Bible 
for the congregation. He was an effervescent member of the American 
Schools of Oriental Research, where he will be mourned as well as 
celebrated.
  As was said about Job, it could be said of Marvin H. Pope: ''. . . 
thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased 
in the land.'' I ask that an an article on Marvin Pope, from the New 
York Times be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                  [From the New York Times, June 1997]

       Marvin Pope, 80, Profesor and Authority on Ancient Ugarit

                         (By Holcomb B. Noble)

       Marvin H. Pope, a retired Yale professor who was one of the 
     world's leading authorities on Ugarit, the ancient city in 
     Syria where excavations shed important light on the ancient 
     Scriptures, died on Sunday at First Church of Round Hill in 
     Greenwich, Conn. He was 80.
       He and his wife had just finished reading passages from the 
     Bible to the congregation and returned to their pew when he 
     collapsed.
       Mr. Pope was a professor of Near Eastern languages and 
     civilizations from 1949 to 1986 and taught at the Yale 
     Divinity School and in the religious studies department.
       In addition, he helped prepare the first major revision of 
     the King James Version of the Bible, the Revised Standard 
     Version, in the 1940's. In the 1980's he worked with others 
     advising the National Council of Churches on the New Revised 
     Standard Version, which removed some traditional language 
     regarded as sexist. These are the two versions used in most 
     Protestant churches.
       Many of Mr. Pope's contributions to the study of the Hebrew 
     text of the Bible and to modern English translations stemmed 
     from a day in 1928 when a farmer plowing a field in northern 
     Syria struck what he thought was a stone. It emerged, 
     instead, as part of the extensive remains, uncovered by 
     archeologists over the next year, of a cosmopolitan city on 
     the Mediterranean that had thrived in 2000 B.C. but had been 
     ransacked and burned in about 1200 B.C.
       Among the discoveries were Ugaritic art and clay tablets 
     whose language was similar to biblical Hebrew, of which Mr. 
     Pope, over the years, became a major translator. They added 
     significant new meanings, nuances and detail to the early 
     writings of the Old Testament and the culture of their time. 
     The tablets were traced to a period from 1500 B.C to 1180 
     B.C.
       Mr. Pope's work on the tablets resulted in his 
     retranslations from the ancient Hebrew of the entire books of 
     Job and the Song of Songs, and a lengthy commentary about 
     them both, published in 1973 and 1977 by the Anchor Bible 
     Series. Robert R. Wilson, a professor of religious studies at 
     Yale, said those two translations were ``the brilliant works 
     of a master scholar'' and added to the general understanding 
     of an age and its poetry.
       Scholars said that one of the difficulties in translating 
     the early tablets was that the words had been crammed onto 
     the surfaces with less regard for their legibility than 
     whether they would fit. It was often difficult to determine, 
     as a result, which line of poetry followed which. Mr. Pope 
     was able to arrange the lines in proper sequence and poetic 
     form.
       Another difficulty was that the meanings of the first lines 
     of the verses tended to be echoed in the second lines but 
     with rarer language. Mr. Pope was one of the few able to 
     capture the meaning of the rarer passages.
       He visited the site of the 1929 excavations, near the 
     modern town of Latakia, north of Damascus, though most of his 
     studies took place in Paris, where the hundreds of tablets 
     were put on display.
       A man whose wit made him popular among generations of Yale 
     students, he said that one of his findings was that Baal, 
     chief god of the Ugarits, was not always chief, as scholars 
     had thought, but had maneuvered to take over from the god El, 
     whom he kicked further upstairs.
       Marvin Hoyle Pope was born on June 23, 1916, in Durham, 
     N.C., the son of Charles and Bessie Cleveland Sorrell Pope. 
     He earned a bachelor's degree in 1938 at Duke University, 
     where he was signed up by mistake for a course in Hebrew. He 
     remained in the course, which led him to a master's degree in 
     Semitic languages and literature in 1939. He received a 
     doctorate from Yale in 1949.
       His first wife, Helen Thompson Pope, died in 1979.
       In addition to his wife, Ingrid Bloomquist Pope, he is 
     survived by a son, Marvin Jr., and a daughter, Beverly, both 
     of New Haven; three stepchildren, Dennis Bloomquist of Great 
     Falls, VA, Diane B. Connelly of Shaker Heights, OH, and 
     Laurel B. Shields of Austin, TX.; a sister, Mary Gladys 
     Hodges of Durham, NC and eight grandchildren.

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