John Van Seters

John Van Seters (May 2, 1935 – April 9, 2025) was a Canadian scholar of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the Ancient Near East. He was a University Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, and James A. Gray Professor of Biblical Literature at UNC. He completed his Ph.D at Yale University in Near Eastern Studies (1965) and earned a Th.D. h.c. from the University of Lausanne (1999). His honours and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, and research fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and National Research Foundation of South Africa. His many publications include The Hyksos: A New Investigation (1966); Abraham in History and Tradition (1975); In Search of History (1983, for which he won the James H. Breasted Prize and the American Academy of Religion book award); The Edited Bible (2006); and The Biblical Saga of King David (2009).

Van Seters died in Waterloo, Ontario on April 9, 2025, at the age of 89.