Anson Rainey

Anson Frank Rainey (January 11, 1930 – February 19, 2011) was Professor Emeritus of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and Semitic Linguistics at Tel Aviv University. He is known in particular for contributions to the study of the Amarna tablets, the noted administrative letters from the period of Pharaoh Akhenaten's rule during the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. He authored and edited books and articles on the cultures, languages and geography of the Biblical lands.

Anson Rainey was born in Dallas, Texas in 1930. Upon the death of his father that same year he was left with his maternal grandparents. He attended Brown Military Academy in San Diego, California from 1943 to 1946. After one semester of study there – as a Cadet Battalion Commander – he served as Assistant Commandant at Southern California Military Academy in Long Beach, California for the Spring semester of 1947, before transferring to John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas.

From 1948-49 he worked as Assistant Commandant at the Brown Military Academy of the Ozarks, in Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, while attending university. He took the B.A. degree there in Religious Education in August 1949. From 1949-51, he worked as a social worker for the San Bernardino County Welfare Department in California. He went on to enroll in the California Baptist Theological Seminary in Covina, California, where he took three degrees: an M.A. in Old Testament (May 1953); a B.D. in Biblical Theology (May 1954); and an M.Th. in Old Testament (May 1955).

From September 1953 until May 1954, Rainey was a teaching fellow in Hebrew, Old Testament and New Testament Introduction. In 1954 he was appointed Assistant Professor and taught for two more years. From 1955–56, he studied at the University of California, Los Angeles and completed the B.A. with Honors in August 1956. In 1957, he began graduate study at Brandeis University, where he earned an M.A. in June 1959. He spent a third year of residence (1959–60), studying for his Ph.D. He came to Israel in June 1960, as the sole American recipient of the Government of Israel Award. From 1960-61, he studied at the Hebrew University, first in an intensive Hebrew course and then in archaeology and in the Egyptian, Coptic and Phoenician languages, all in Hebrew. At the same time, he completed the basic research for his doctoral dissertation. In 1961, he returned to Brandeis as a research assistant. Upon completion of his dissertation on the Social Structure of Ugarit, he was awarded his Ph.D. in June 1962.

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