John Strugnell - Early Career

Early Career

Strugnell was educated at St. Paul's School in London. He took a double first in Classics and Semitics at Oxford but never finished his dissertation and only held a Master's degree. Despite not having completed his doctorate, Strugnell was given a position at the Oriental Institute of Chicago in 1956-57, where he met his future wife, Cecile Pierlot, whose father had been Prime Minister of Belgium during the Second World War. He was away from his Scrolls again from 1960 to 1967, this time at Duke University, though he returned in summers to continue his efforts in Jerusalem. Still without his doctorate, as he would be for the rest of his life, Strugnell served from 1966-1991 as Professor of Christian Origins at Harvard. He succeeded Pierre Benoit as editor-in-chief of the Scrolls in 1984, a position he held until 1990. During this period he was responsible for bringing Elisha Qimron and Emanuel Tov to work on the scrolls, breaking the long standing exclusion of Israeli scholars. At the same time, he kept notable scholars such as Theodor Gaster and Robert Eisenman from having access to the scrolls, a situation that was rectified when Strugnell was removed from his post and the scrolls (such as those at the Huntingdon Library in California) were opened to the wider scholarly community for the first time.