Christopher B. Hays

Today we lost Prof. Patrick D. Miller. In reading just the first eulogies from my friends, it's remarkable how many people he inspired to love the Old Testament, and to teach it.

My favorite memories of him were his OT Intro lectures, in which he would first scandalize my conservative classmates with the Documentary Hypothesis or the archaeological problems with the conquest accounts, and them close with a brief but thundering sermonette better than anything we were going to hear from anyone else the rest of the year. I remember in particular one day when he had gotten going on some key aspects of social justice, and summoned us to take it seriously: "I would not want to be there when those who ignore these commandments one day stand before the throne of God." If I ever knew a person I think might have stood occasionally in the divine council, it was him. He certainly knew a lot about it.

I had him for OT intro, OT Exegesis, Psalms, and Ten Commandments. He taught me more than I can do justice to. But he also knew so many things that I am still figuring out. Anyone who knew him recognized his wisdom. He didn't particularly specialize in wisdom literature, but he had wisdom in spades: the integration of creative, worldly understanding (חכמה) and the fear of the Lord.

His guide to exegesis was (is) an amazing document. It's essentially a guide to writing a critical commentary -- a professional critical commentary -- on the text. You were supposed to look at the text from every angle: textual criticism, form criticism, historical and contextual information, literary criticism, canonical criticism, etc. He gave this guide to a bunch of master's students who (now I appreciate this so much more) by and large had almost none of the skills required. But he was a Reformed theologian, and so one of the Uses of the Law was to convict the hearer of how far short they had fallen of righteousness on their own account. Yet he shamed no one, and anyone who studied under him was better for it.

In a field where most SBL sections are in some ways worlds unto themselves, he was a polymath, an omnivore. He wrote both a state-of-the-art history of Israelite religion and a book on preaching the Old Testament. He published on Hebrew inscriptions, Ugaritic tablets, and collections of theological essays. His book They Cried to the Lord taught the reader about the human pathos of Psalmic prayer, but also that “when Israel began to pray to the Lord, it did so in the midst of peoples whose arms had long been raised and whose heads had been bowed to the gods that directed their lives and delivered them from danger” (p. 3). That is to say, it shaped its readers by reminding them of their common humanity with other faiths. That’s a message we need more than ever now, and it’s powerful theology informed by broad critical and comparative sensibilities. That still seems to me to be the very best kind of theology, though it is as uncommon now as it was then.

I have sometimes told the story of what his teaching on Psalms did for me personally: When I decided I would go to seminary, I also decided I would prepare myself by reading the Psalms every night, as a spiritual discipline. I quickly discovered what anyone would: that the Psalter is full of very difficult stuff. So many unfamiliar cultural forms and details—not to mention some sentiments that just don’t seem OK to pray, to a privileged modern person. Prof. Miller effectively gave the Psalms back to me, albeit transformed. As Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.” That has become a goal for my own teaching.

He put me on this path -- stopped me on the stairs in Stuart Hall and said, “You *are* thinking about a PhD, aren't you?” I've spent my career trying to live up to his example. (Surely a fool's errand.) If he had still been accepting PhD students at that time, I would have a PTS PhD diploma on my wall today. As it was, he personally put me in touch with the mentors (including Brent Strawn) who guided me from there, and when I moved to Emory he even connected me with Belle, who lived one town over in the Atlanta suburbs.

One small, beloved detail of his most interesting life: He was the professor upon whom Ann Waldron modeled the character Prof. Agnus McKay in her murder mystery novel Unholy Death in Princeton. Witty, erudite, warm, welcoming, and sympathetic, Prof. McKay is almost worthy of Prof. Miller.

Not many a week has gone by, since I left Princeton in 2003, that I have not thought about Prof. Miller in some way. Though my email records, intact back to 2008, reflect a string of appreciative notes along the way, it could never be enough to thank him for who he was for me and for so many. I am strangely lonely in his absence, but his memory will always be a blessing.

Christopher B. Hays
D. Wilson Moore Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies
School of Theology | Fuller Theological Seminary