Leroy Waterman

Leroy Waterman (July 4, 1875 – May 9, 1972) was a professor of Oriental Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan, an archaeologist of the Middle East, an Old Testament scholar, a translator of the Revised Standard Version Old Testament, and a proponent of a distinctive interpretation of the Christian faith.

He was born in Pierpont, Ohio, July 4, 1875, receiving his early education in the public schools of Pierpont and at the New Lyme Institute in New Lyme, OH. He graduated from Hillsdale College with a BA in 1898 and BD in 1900, and then studied at Oxford (1900-02), the University of Berlin (1906-07), and the University of Chicago, where he received a PhD in 1912. Waterman taught Hebrew language and literature at the Divinity School of Hillsdale College from 1902 to 1910 and taught as a fellow at the University of Chicago from 1910 to 1912. He became professor of Old Testament and the history of religion at Meadville (PA) Theological School in 1913, and two years later joined the University of Michigan as head of the Department of Semitics, which became the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures and is now the Near Eastern Studies Department. He remained at Michigan until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1945. Waterman married Mabelle Alice Walrath in 1906, and they had two children: Dorothea Lydia and Donald Leroy. The Watermans were long-time members of the First Baptist Church of Ann Arbor.

A distinguished Biblical scholar, during the years 1922-27 Waterman was one of five members of the translation committee of the University of Chicago that produced "The Bible: An American Translation," sometimes called the “Chicago Bible.” From 1938-52 he was one of 31 scholars appointed by the National Council of Churches of Christ in America to the committee which produced the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, of which the New testament appeared in 1946 and the Old Testament in 1952. He served as the annual professor at the American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad, Iraq in 1928-29, and from 1928 to 1931 was director of a Mesopotamian archaeological expedition at Tel-Umar, twenty-five miles south of Baghdad, which was sponsored by the University of Michigan, the Toledo (OH) Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Art Museum. Waterman began the excavation of the ancient city of Seleucia on the Tigris, having located the site through his study of ancient documents and the use of aerial photographs. The results were published in the "Preliminary Report Upon the Excavations at Tel Umar, Iraq" (University of Michigan Press 1931) and the "Second Preliminary Report" (1933). Waterman was also director of a University of Michigan archaeological expedition at Sepphoris, near Nazareth, during the summer of 1931. These results were published in the "Preliminary Report of the University of Michigan at Sepphoris, Palestine" (University, of Michigan Press, 1931). Additional scholarly work included editing volume XIV of R.F. Harper's "Assyrian and Babylonian Letters" (1912), translating "Some Koujunjik Letters and Related Texts" (1912), "Business Documents of the Hammurabi Period" (1916), and "The Royal Correspondence of the Assyrian Empire" (four vol. 1930).

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