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David Noel Freedman, son of the writer David Freedman, was a biblical scholar, author, editor, archaeologist, and, after his conversion from Judaism, a Presbyterian minister. He was one of the first Americans to work on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He attended the City College of New York, after which he entered Princeton Theological Seminary, where he earned a Bachelor of Theology degree in 1944. He then went on to study Semitic Languages and Literature at The Johns Hopkins University. In 1947, while he was still a graduate student, the excavation of caves near the Dead Sea was just beginning to unearth thousands of fragments of texts. He became one of the first American scholars to get access and spent twenty years painstakingly studying and translating a scroll of Leviticus, one of the books of the Torah. After earning his doctorate in 1948, he then held a series of professorial and administrative positions at various theological institutions and universities. (+info)

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