AN OBITUARY FOR JOHN STRUGNELL by Daniel Harrington has been posted at the SBL Forum. Excerpt:

Much of Strugnell’s most important scholarly work came in the early years of his collaboration with the Dead Sea scrolls editorial team in Jerusalem. There he showed a remarkable facility in assembling fragments, deciperhing badly damaged manuscripts, and identifying texts. His most significant publications appear in the DJD volumes devoted to 4QMMT (with Elisha Qimron) and 4QInstruction (with Daniel J. Harrington). In recent years he took a special interest in the Qumran wisdom texts and wrote several articles on their language and interpretation.

Perhaps even more important to Strugnell than his own publications was his commitment to train a new generation of scholars who might work successfully on Qumran texts and in the field of Second Temple Judaism. They include Harold Attridge, James H. Charlesworth, John Collins, Carol Newsom, Eileen Schuller, Thomas Tobin, and Sze-kar Wan. He gave to his doctoral students enormous amounts of time and attention, patterned after the Oxford tutorial system in which he was educated. I was one of the first beneficiaries of his generosity at Harvard in my work on Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum. He was also remarkably generous in helping other students and professors with their projects. When I once asked why he was spending several weeks poring over a huge book manuscript written by a fellow scholar, he said, “This is going to be an important book, and I want to make it as good as I can.”

As editor-in-chief of the Dead Scrolls project Strugnell sought to maintain the integrity and continuity of the project while opening it up and restructuring the team and their assignments. He included Israeli scholars such as Emanuel Tov and Devorah Dimant and worked closely with Elisha Qimron on 4QMMT. The great European scholars Florentino García Martínez and Émile Puech regard him as one of their teachers too. These distinguished students and scholars have gone on to train their students in Qumranology and Second Temple Judaism. In his modest way Strugnell was a remarkably effective teacher.