MURPHY, Roland E(dmund) 1917-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born July 19, 1917, in Chicago, IL; died July 20, 2002, in Washington, DC. Catholic priest, educator, and author. Murphy was a scholar of the Old Testament and was on the board of revisers for the New American Bible and the New Revised Standard Version. After entering the Carmelite Order in 1935 and being ordained in 1942, he earned his doctorate degree in sacred theology in 1948 from the Catholic University of America, as well as a degree in sacred scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in 1958. Murphy then took a post as an instructor in Semitic languages at Catholic University of America in 1948 and became a professor of theology there in 1956. In 1971 he moved on to Duke University, where he was a professor of the Old Testament until his retirement in 1987. A believer in translating the Bible so that terms were gender-neutral, Murphy worked on new versions of the Bible with this goal in mind. He also worked as an editor for the new revised edition of The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (1990) and for other works such as The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (1991). Murphy was, furthermore, the author of several scholarly books on the Bible, including Seven Books of Wisdom (1960), Wisdom Literature (1981), and Experiencing Our Biblical Heritage (2001). In addition, he was on the editorial board of such scholarly journals as the Catholic Biblical Quarterly and was a former president of the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature of the United States.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Writers Directory, 13th edition, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1997.

periodicals

Independent (London, England), August 30, 2002, p. 16.

online

Daily Dialogue,http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/daily.html/ (September 13, 2002).