COOKE, GEORGE ALBERT°

COOKE, GEORGE ALBERT° (1865–1939), English Bible scholar and Semitist. He taught at Oxford and was canon of Christ Church (1914–36). Cooke is remembered principally for A Text-book of North Semitic Inscriptions (1903), a pioneering effort to collate and interpret Hebrew, Moabite, Phoenician, Punic, Nabatean, Palmyrene, and Old Aramaic Semitic inscriptions. His commentaries for the "Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges" (Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, 1913) underscored the importance of philology in textual criticism. In his important commentary on the Book of Ezekiel (ICC, 1936, 1951), he argued that the book was written by one and the same hand with very little editorial expansion. Among his lesser-known works are an exposition on the Song of Deborah (1892), a study of the problem of revelation (1911), and a critical second edition of E.A. Edgehill's Book of Amos (1914). (Zev Garber)