George E. Mendenhall, American Biblical scholar, Died at 99

  Educator

George Emery Mendenhall was born on August 13, 1916, and died on August 5, 2016.

He was an American Biblical scholar.

George taught at the University of Michigan’s Department of Near Eastern Studies.

He received his from Midland College in Nebraska in 1936, and from Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg in 1938.

He was first an ordained Lutheran minister, and during World War II he served as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy.

After the war, Mendenhall obtained a Ph.D. in Semitic languages from Johns Hopkins University and began a career in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical studies as well as related archeology.

He was a professor at the University of Michigan from 1952 to 1986.

He was honored the University of Michigan honored Mendenhall by creating the “George E. Mendenhall Professor Emeritus of Ancient and Biblical Studies”.

The Tenth Generation proposed that the Ancient Israelite settlement was really the result of a cultural-religious egalitarian revolution within Canaanite society, rejecting the views it was either a military conquest or a process of peaceful sedentism.

The notion became popular with some New Left scholars in the mid-1970s.

He died in August 2016, only 8 days short of his 100th birthday.

George E. Mendenhall passed away at 99 years old.