Born: 28 May, 1930, in Coatbridge.
Died: 17 November, 2008, in Edinburgh, aged 78.
THE Reverend Professor John Clark Love Gibson was a scholar minister of humour and passion. He spent most of his working life in the University of Edinburgh; but
the wellbeing of the Scottish Kirk and nation, and proper education for its ministers, had a high claim on his attention. He deplored the removal of compulsory Hebrew and Greek from the theological curriculum.
A son of the manse, he was born in Coatbridge, where his father, Herbert B Gibson, was minister of Whifflet (1925-67). Schooled in Coatbridge, he went on to Glasgow University, where he graduated MA with a 1st in Semitic languages (1953), then BD with distinction (1956). He married Nancy, whom he had met while he was a student assistant minister at Bellshill, before moving in 1956 to Magdalen College, Oxford.
John and Nancy would have four sons and a daughter, and all survive him. In Oxford, he researched with the noted Hebraist Sir Godfrey Driver and graduated DPhil in 1959.
Ordained and inducted by the presbytery of Aberdeen, he spent three years as minister of New Machar before being appointed lecturer in Hebrew and Semitic languages at New College on the Mound in Edinburgh.
He remained in the University of Edinburgh from 1962 until his retirement in 1994, promoted reader (1973) and then professor (1987).
In Edinburgh, he took the opportunity of postgraduate study in general linguistics, and was soon recognised as a leading scholar of the nature and early history of Hebrew language – one who was also at home in Arabic, as well as the ancient Semitic languages of Akkadian and Ugaritic.
His publications were fresh, varied, and considerable – and in almost each writing venture he was to imprint his own mark on a project he had inherited from a predecessor. George A Cooke, a former fellow of Magdalen, had published in 1903 a Textbook of North-Semitic Inscriptions, dedicating it to his teacher SR Driver (Sir Godfrey's father).
The Oxford University Press entrusted Gibson with preparing a replacement, which he achieved in three volumes (1971, 1975, and 1982). In 1978, he brought out what was called "a complete revision" of his mentor Godfrey Driver's Canaanite Myths and Legends (1956). This was essentially a fresh study of these 2nd millennium BCE texts from ancient Ugarit on the northern coast of Syria, whose discovery has so illumined the eastern Mediterranean world which cradled both the Hebrew Bible and classical Greece.
He was then asked by the publisher of William Barclay's Daily Study Bible to prepare a complement to Barclay's enormously successful coverage of the New Testament. Recruiting a dozen other scholars to write one or more volumes, and himself contributing two volumes on Genesis (1981-2) and one on Job (1983), he edited all 22 volumes, and kept the whole venture to time.
In the 1990s he returned to his earlier work on the Hebrew language and published in 1994 a 4th edition of the classic Hebrew Syntax by AB Davidson of New College – again essentially a fresh study of his own (Davidson's 3rd had appeared in 1901).
In that same year of his retirement, he served as president of the Society of Old Testament Study. Overlapping the society's summer meeting in Edinburgh, a conference on Ugaritic studies was held; and the papers delivered on that occasion were published as a volume in his honour: Ugarit, Religion and Culture (1996). His first volume completely independent of great predecessors came only after his retirement. Language and Imagery in the Old Testament (1998) was dedicated to his students in New College, and represented a distillation of his efforts over more than 30 years to communicate to the many who have little or no Hebrew just how the Hebrew Bible casts its spell.
In a "Retrospect and Prospect" to a collection edited by his colleague David F Wright on The Bible in Scottish Life and Literature (1988), he had lamented that neither the Reformation period nor any time since had produced a complete Bible in Scots. Accordingly, he determined that one of his retirement projects would be to commission and edit a Scots Old Testament to complement The New Testament in Scots by WL Lorimer (1983), and emulate his own success over the Daily Study Bible. But infirmity struck and did not retreat – and in any case translators with competence in Hebrew and Scots are few.
His latter years were spent in the care of Edinburgh's Astley Ainslie Hospital, where he died.
John Gibson was a much-loved lecturer, preacher and colleague – a stalwart of the annual staff-student golf fixture. One of his colleagues noted on his retirement how John had enjoyed "playing the role of a figure from the past with his three-piece suit, gold watch chain, and kaleidoscopic selection of hats", and added that his conversation included on the one hand his antipathy to "the iniquity of academic audit, quality assessment and all the other time-consuming apparatus of academic bureaucracy" and on the other his love for "the incomparable glories of the book of Job".
Words from his introduction to that book bring this appreciation to a close: "When we reach the end of this unique and scarifying and excoriating book, we will know that we have had an exceedingly uncomfortable and tempestuous ride. No book before or since has so remorselessly peeled away the layers of piety and hypocrisy, of self-pity and self-deceit, of meretricious grovelling and heaven-defying arrogance with which, down the ages, humankind has tried to cover over the truth about itself."
GRAEME AULDThe full article contains 946 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
