George Brooke (1970) awarded British Academy Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies

St Peter’s College alumnus Professor George J. Brooke (Theology, 1970) has been awarded the prestigious British Academy Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies for his pioneering work on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

An expert in early Judaism and early Christianity, George was inspired to study the Dead Sea Scrolls during his time as an undergraduate at St Peter’s College studying under Preben Wernberg-Møller.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, some of which are also known also as the Qumran Caves Scrolls, were discovered in the mid-twentieth century. The ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts have transformed the field of biblical studies, shedding new light on Judaism and early Christianity in the Second Temple period. Since 1992, George has been part of the editorial team for the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was a founding editor of the leading journal Dead Sea Discoveries (1993-2003) and for almost 30 years has co-edited the Journal of Semitic Studies. His publications include Exegesis at Qumran (1985; reprinted, 2006), The Allegro Qumran Collection (1996), The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (2005), Qumran and the Jewish Jesus (2005), Reading the Dead Sea Scrolls: Essays in Method (2013), and The Dead Sea Scrolls and German Scholarship (2018).

George completed a BA in 1973 at St Peter’s College, a PGCE in 1974 at St John’s College, Cambridge, and a PhD in Biblical Studies (as a Fulbright Scholar) in 1978 at Claremont Graduate School, California. He was awarded a DD from Oxford in 2010 and has an honorary doctorate from the University of Lausanne (2018). From 1984 until 2016 he taught Biblical Studies at the UnIversity of Manchester, where from 1998 he was the Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis; he is now Professor Emeritus. In 1999, he was the President of the British Association for Jewish Studies. In 2012, he was President of the Society for Old Testament Study. He completed a three-year term as President of the European Association of Biblical Studies in 2024. He is a Visiting Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Chester. In 2018, he gave the Smilde Lectures at the University of Groningen; in 2019, he presented the Schweich Lectures at the British Academy. He was presented with a collection of essays to mark his 65th birthday: Is There a Text in This Cave? Studies in the Textuality of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honour of George J. Brooke (ed. A. Feldman, M. Cioată, C. Hempel; STDJ 119; Leiden: Brill, 2017).

Reflecting on his career, George said,

‘Reading Theology at St Peter's set me on a life-long career in Biblical Studies. A College Prize, awarded to me for my results in Prelims, enabled me to buy my first Hebrew dictionary. Working in particular with Preben Wernberg-Møller, Professorial Fellow at SPC (1968-1990; Emeritus Fellow 1990-2016), who had completed his Oxford DPhil on the Dead Sea Scrolls, I was stimulated to study the Scrolls in my own postgraduate research. With happy coincidence, I now edit the Dutch book series on the Scrolls in which Preben Wernberg-Møller published his revised DPhil in 1957. More importantly, I married Jane in 1976, the daughter of Dr Arthur Peacocke, Fellow in Biochemistry (1959-1973).’

The Burkitt Medal is a significant honour, awarded annually in recognition of special service to Biblical Studies, for Hebrew Bible studies (in odd years) and in New Testament studies (in even years). You can read more about the prize and George’s many accolades here.

Sources: 2024 news release for Burkitt Medal https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/prizes-medals/burkitt-medal-biblical-studies/.