Ovid R. Sellers
Encyclopedia
Ovid Rogers Sellers was an internationally known Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...

 scholar and archaeologist who played a role in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Dead Sea scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...

. He served as Professor of the Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...

 and Dean of McCormick Theological Seminary
McCormick Theological Seminary
McCormick Theological Seminary is one of eleven schools of theology of the Presbyterian Church . It shares a campus with the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, bordering the campus of the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois...

 in Chicago, Illinois from 1924-1954.

Ovid Sellers grew up on the campus of Wentworth Military Academy
Wentworth Military Academy
Wentworth Military Academy and College is a private four-year college preparatory high school and military junior college. It is located in Lexington, Missouri, part of the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area. Wentworth is the oldest military academy west of the Mississippi River, and the...

 in Lexington, Missouri
Lexington, Missouri
Lexington is a city in Lafayette County, Missouri, United States. The population was 4,453 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Lafayette County. Located in western Missouri, Lexington lies about 40 miles east of Kansas City and is part of the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area...

, and graduated from Wentworth at age 13, the youngest in the history of the school. He earned an A.B. from the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 in 1904, a B.D. from McCormick Theological Seminary, becoming an ordained Presbyterian minister, in 1914, and a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 in 1922. His studies concentrated largely on the Old Testament and ancient languages, including Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

, Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

, Hebrew, Aramaic, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Syriac, and Akkadian Cuneiform.

His father, Sandford Sellers
Sandford Sellers
Sandford Sellers served as Principal, Superintendent and President of Wentworth Military Academy from 1880 to 1935.Sandford Sellers was born in Kentucky in 1854, but was raised on a ranch in eastern Texas. As a young boy, he worked in cotton and sugar cane fields, As a young adult, he was a...

, was superintendent of Wentworth Military Academy, and Ovid returned to fill positions at the Academy while gaining his education, serving variously as instructor (1905-06, 1910-12), coach, and headmaster (1919-21). He also was the editor of the local paper, the Lexington Intelligencer News, from 1907-11. In World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, he served as a chaplain
Chaplain
Traditionally, a chaplain is a minister in a specialized setting such as a priest, pastor, rabbi, or imam or lay representative of a religion attached to a secular institution such as a hospital, prison, military unit, police department, university, or private chapel...

 and First Lieutenant
First Lieutenant
First lieutenant is a military rank and, in some forces, an appointment.The rank of lieutenant has different meanings in different military formations , but the majority of cases it is common for it to be sub-divided into a senior and junior rank...

 in the 17th Field Artillery, Second Division, AEF
American Expeditionary Force
The American Expeditionary Forces or AEF were the United States Armed Forces sent to Europe in World War I. During the United States campaigns in World War I the AEF fought in France alongside British and French allied forces in the last year of the war, against Imperial German forces...

. After getting his doctorate from Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins was a wealthy American entrepreneur, philanthropist and abolitionist of 19th-century Baltimore, Maryland, now most noted for his philanthropic creation of the institutions that bear his name, namely the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the Johns Hopkins University and its associated...

, he became a Professor of the Old Testament at McCormick Theological Seminary, serving in that position from 1924 to 1954, and as Dean from 1934 to 1954. He periodically served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

.

He was Director of the American Schools of Oriental Research
American Schools of Oriental Research
The American Schools of Oriental Research, founded in 1900, supports and encourages the study of the peoples and cultures of the Near East, from the earliest times to the present. It is apolitical and has no religious affiliation...

 in Jerusalem in 1948-49 and was immediately thrust into the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Dead Sea scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...

. In early September 1948, Mar Samuel
Mar Samuel
Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue Samuel , more often referred to as Mar Samuel, was a Metropolitan and Archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, as well as a central figure in the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls....

, who had acquired the first four scrolls soon after their discovery in 1947, showed Sellers some additional scroll fragments that he had acquired. A few weeks later, on September 23, 1948, Sellers boarded a small twin engine Arab Airways biplane, flying from Beirut to Amman. Travel was very dangerous. The British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 mandate in Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....

 ended on May 15, 1948. War broke out immediately, and peace would not be restored until November. While en route, Sellers' plane was intercepted and attacked by an Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

i fighter aircraft, forcing it to crash-land in Transjordan
Transjordan
The Emirate of Transjordan was a former Ottoman territory in the Southern Levant that was part of the British Mandate of Palestine...

 territory. Three of the six on board were killed, with Sellers as one of the survivors. A United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

 investigation led by Ralph J. Bunche found that the Provisional government of Israel
Provisional government of Israel
The provisional government of Israel was the temporary cabinet which governed Israel from shortly before independence until the formation of the first government in March 1949 following the first Knesset elections in January that year....

 was "responsible for a serious breach of the terms of the Truce as a result of unjustified attacks made by an Israeli fighter aircraft upon the Transjordan aircraft, resulting in the deaths of three persons, burns and injuries to three other persons, as well as the destruction of the attacked aircraft, and the incursion upon Transjordan territory by the Israeli fighter aircraft." In 1950, Bunche would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel.-Background:According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who...

 for his efforts to bring peace to Palestine.

Sellers recuperated and returned to his job within a few weeks. By the end of 1948, nearly two years after the discovery of the scrolls, no scholar had yet located the cave where the fragments had been found. With the unrest in the country, no large scale search could be undertaken. Sellers attempted to get the Syrians to help locate the cave, but they demanded more money than Sellers could offer. The cave was finally discovered on January 28, 1949 by a UN observer, and Sellers brought his box brownie camera to take the first photos of the cave, which were soon published in Life Magazine. In an attempt to date the scrolls, Sellers took some linen found in the cave, presumably from an outer wrapping of the scrolls, and brought it back to the University of Chicago. Unfortunately, the carbon-14
Carbon-14
Carbon-14, 14C, or radiocarbon, is a radioactive isotope of carbon with a nucleus containing 6 protons and 8 neutrons. Its presence in organic materials is the basis of the radiocarbon dating method pioneered by Willard Libby and colleagues , to date archaeological, geological, and hydrogeological...

 test, done at Chicago in 1950, was inconclusive, with a range from 245 BCE to 245 CE. It was later found that the carbon-14 test's margin of error was at 500 years.

Sellers was a staff member on 10 archaeological expeditions in Palestine, three of which he directed. He retired from McCormick in 1954, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. It is the fourth-largest city in the state and is the seat of . Santa Fe had a population of 67,947 in the 2010 census...

 the following year. He served as a Lecturer at the School of Theology in Djakarta, Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

 in 1955, and returned to the American Schools of Oriental Research
American Schools of Oriental Research
The American Schools of Oriental Research, founded in 1900, supports and encourages the study of the peoples and cultures of the Near East, from the earliest times to the present. It is apolitical and has no religious affiliation...

 in 1957-58 as Professor of Archaeology. Sellers died in his hometown of Lexington, Missouri in 1975. Sellers had three children: Roger Sellers, Betty Sellers, and Lucia Sellers Butler
Lucia Sellers Butler
Lucia Sellers Butler, known as "Grandma Moses of the Caribbean", was known for her primitive island paintings available on the island of Anguilla. She was the daughter of archaeologist Ovid R. Sellers....

.

Publications

  • The Citadel of Beth Zur, a Preliminary Report of the First Excavation Conducted By the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Chicago, and the American School of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, in 1931 at Khirbat et Tubeiqa. Ovid R. Sellers. Westminster Press, 1933.
  • Biblical Hebrew for beginners, by Ovid R. Sellers & Edwin Edgar Voigt
    Edwin Edgar Voigt
    Edwin Edgar Voigt was an American Bishop of German descent in The Methodist Church, elected in 1952. He served as the Bishop of the Dakotas Episcopal Area....

    ; Publisher: Chicago, Blessing Book Stores, inc., 1941.
  • Westminster Study Edition of the Bible, with maps. Dr. Floyd V. Filson (New Testament), Dr. Ovid R. Sellers (Old Testament). Westminster Press. 1948.
  • Genesis Rhymes: Words, Music and Illustrations. Ovid Rogers Sellers. Publisher: McCormick Cooperative Store.
  • A Roman-Byzantine burial cave in northern Palestine (The joint excavation of ASOR and McCormick Theol. Sem. at Silet edh-Dhahr). Ovid R. Sellers of McCormick Theological Seminary; and Baramki, D. C. New Haven: ASOR, 1953.
  • The Fifth Quarter Century at McCormick, 1929-1954. McCormick Theological Seminary, 1955.
  • 1957 Excavation at Beth-Zur. Ovid R. Sellers, et al. Cambridge: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1957.
  • The Monuments And The Old Testament. by Ira Manrice Price; Ovid R. Sellers; E. Leslie Carlson. The Judson Press, Philadelphia, Pa. 1958.

External links

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