| Activity | William Duff McHardy, usually known as 'Mac', was educated at Fordyce Academy and Aberdeen University. He was licensed as a preacher by the Presbytery of Fordyce. He studied Semitic Languages at the University of Edinburgh (he took a First in 1938), then moved to St John's College, Oxford, where he gained a DPhil in 1943 for his edition of the Peshitta version of the Book of Ecclesiasticus. He was appointed research fellow in Syriac at the Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham in 1942. In 1945, he returned to Oxford as a lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac, then moved to the University of London to be Samuel Davidson Professor of Old Testament Studies. In 1960, he was nominated to the Regius Professorship of Hebrew at Oxford. He was Honorary Curator of the Mingana Collection from 1947-1983.
McHardy was a member of the Old Testament and Apocrypha Teams of the New English Bible, which appeared in full in 1970, after 25 years' work. He led the team that produced the Revised English Bible, which was published in 1989. |