Dr. John A. Cook
Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages Director of Hebrew Instruction
John A. Cook has taught at Asbury since 2007. Over the past 30 years he has taught courses in Bible and biblical languages at the undergraduate and graduate level at a variety of institutions including Asian Theological Seminary in the Philippines, where he served full time from 1993 to 1996, the University of Wisconsin (Madison and Milwaukee campuses), Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Wheaton College, and Grace College, Moscow Evangelical Seminary, Asia Graduate school of Theology, and Baptist Theological Seminary, Singapore. He also briefly worked as acquisitions editor at Eisenbrauns, an academic publisher specializing in the ancient Near East and biblical studies.
Professor Cook’s research goal is to bring insights from the field of linguistics to the disciplines of Biblical Hebrew philology and exegesis. He publishes regularly on topics in Biblical Hebrew linguistics, particularly related to the verbal system. Over the past decade he has been co-authoring a sequence of beginning, intermediate, and advanced Biblical Hebrew textbooks with Robert Holmstedt (Baker Academic, 2013, 2020, in preparation). He has contributed to a number of volumes in the Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Bible series, including the volumes on Qoheleth (2017; co-authored with Robert D. Holmstedt and Phillip S. Marshall), Aramaic Ezra and Daniel (2019), and Isaiah 40-55 (in preparation). Offprints of some of Professor Cook’s articles and book chapters are available at www.ancienthebrewgrammar.wordpress.com. His ongoing Valency Dictionary of Classical Hebrew is also available online.
Professor Cook is passionate about teaching students how to read God’s Word and to strive after wisdom and holiness by seeing how the world of the text interprets the world outside the text and then by living out that interpretation. Professor Cook regularly teaches Introduction to Old Testament, advanced exegesis courses on a variety of books (most recently Isaiah 40-55 and the book of Job), intermediate and advanced Hebrew grammar, Aramaic, and other Semitic languages.
He and his wife, Kathy, live in Wilmore and have four sons and two daughters-in-law.