JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

driver, samuel rolles
on one of their members who was captured by the British, by
seizing British officers and subjecting them to the same humiliating
punishment. Drezner was in command of one unit,
the other four members of which were Mordekhai Alkaḥi,
Eliezer Kashani, Abraham Mizraḥi, and Ḥayyim Golavski.
The whole unit was captured. Mizraḥi was wounded and died
before the trial (one version is that he was murdered) and the
other four put on trial. Golavski was sentenced to life imprisonment
in view of his youth, while the other three were sentenced
to death. An attempt to rescue them by an assault on
the Jerusalem central prison where they were held was foiled
by their removal to Acre on the very morning of the intended
assault. All four, together with Dov *Gruner, were hanged on
the same day, Apr. 16, 1946.
Bibliography: Y. Nedava, Olei-ha-Gardom (1966); Y. Gurion,
Ha-Niẓẓaḥon Olei Gardom (1971).
°DRIVER, SAMUEL ROLLES (1846–1914), Bible scholar and
Hebraist; from 1883 Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford.
Driver’s chief work, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old
Testament, appeared in 1891 (19139). Among his early publications
was A Treatise on the Uses of the Tenses in Hebrew (1874,
18923). He was a practicing Christian ordained as a priest in
the Anglican Church and held various offices in that church.
Nevertheless, he wrote his books in the spirit of the critical
method established by J. *Wellhausen, at the same time stressing
that his conclusions did not impugn the sanctity of the
Bible or attribute literary forgeries to it. He was therefore attacked
from both sides. Conservative theologians condemned
his views as “dangerous,” while some of his fellow Bible critics
accused him of making concessions to orthodox extremism.
Driver was alert to every new potential source of information
on the Bible, as may be seen by the fact that he was among
the first to write a book on archaeology and the Bible, Modern
Research as Illustrating the Bible (1909). Driver was one of the
editors of the “International Critical Commentary” series of
scholarly editions of biblical books, and also contributed commentaries
on Deuteronomy (1895, 19023), and Job (with G.B.
Gray, 1905). His other works include commentaries on Genesis
(19119), Exodus (1911), Daniel (1900), and other books of
the Bible, and papers on specific points in the prophetic writings,
as well as researches into the Masoretic text of Samuel
(Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of
Samuel, 1890, 19132). He also participated in the compilation
of A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (with
F. Brown and C.A. Briggs, 1907). This work, based on the
lexicon of William *Gesenius, and popularly known as BDB
(from the initials of its authors), remains in widespread use.
Together with A. *Neubauer, he published The “Suffering Servant”
of Isaiah According to the Jewish Interpreters (1877). All
of Driver’s books were well written and carefully researched
and three of them are so basic that for all the progress that
has been made since then the specialist still has occasion to
consult them (his Introduction…, his Tenses, and his Notes on
the Hebrew Text).
His son SIR GODFREY ROLLES DRIVER (1892–1975),
Bible and Semitic scholar, gained knowledge of the Middle
East with the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force in 1919 for
which he wrote A Report on Kurdistan and the Kurds (1919).
Later he also published A Grammar of the Colloquial Arabic
of Syria and Palestine (1925). From 1919–28 he taught classics
at Oxford and from 1928 lectured there on Hebrew and comparative
Semitic philology, becoming professor of Semitic
philology (1938–62) and intermittently professor of Hebrew
(1934, 1953–54, and 1959–60).
One of his important early works was “The Modern
Study of the Hebrew Language” in The People and the Book
(ed. A.S. Peake), 73–120. In 1935 he collaborated with J.C. Miles
in editing The Assyrian Laws, which aimed to serve as a textbook
for scholars of the Old Testament as well as of comparative
law (revised as vol. two of Assyrian Laws and Babylonian
Laws, 1952, 1955). The following year Driver published Problems
of the Hebrew Verbal System in which he explained the
peculiarities of the Hebrew tense system and other features
of Hebrew as resulting from the origin of Hebrew as a mixture
of Canaanite and the original language spoken by the Israelites.
In 1948 he published his Schweich Lectures of 1944
under the title Semitic Writing where he examined the origin
and development of the Semitic alphabet and in which he was
one of the first to realize the significance of Ugaritic. In 1954
he edited and translated the Borchardt Aramaic documents
in the Bodleian Museum under the title Aramaic Documents
of the Fifth Century B.C. (revised 1957). These were official and
semiofficial documents from the court of the Persian satrap
in Egypt. The following year he published Canaanite Myths
and Legends, in which he translated Ugaritic legends and included
an Ugaritic glossary.
His Judean Scrolls (1965) discussed the problem of the
identity and date of the community of Qumran, which he
identified with the *Zealots. On his seventieth birthday a
volume of Hebrew and Semitic Studies (1963) was dedicated
to him. It contains a selected bibliography of his works. He
was joint director of the committee that prepared the translation
of the Old Testament in the New English Bible (1970). He
wrote numerous articles on Hebrew lexicography, in which,
by the use of cognate languages, he uncovered hitherto unrecognized
meanings of biblical words. Much of these he incorporated
into the New English Bible and into his work on
a new edition of F. Brown, S.R. Driver, and C.A. Briggs’ Hebrew
Lexicon.
Bibliography: T.K. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament
Criticism (1893), passim (esp. chs. 11–13). Add. Bibliography:
J.A. Emerton, DBI, 308–10.
DROB, MAX (1887–1959), U.S. Conservative rabbi. Drob was
born in Mlawa, Poland, and was taken to the United States
in 1895. He graduated from Columbia University (1908) and
received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological
Seminary (1911), and served congregations in Syracuse, New
York (1911–13), Buffalo, New York (1913–19), New York City
22 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6