Kirk Lowery

Kirk Lowery’s graduate studies began in the late 1970s correcting hard copy printout of a Syriac chrestomathy stored on punch cards. His graduate work at the University of California, Los Angeles (MA, PhD) included proofreading of the book of Judges for the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) effort to create the electronic version of Biblia Hebraica Stuttargtensia under the direction of H. Van Parunak. It was this involvement that led to his first contact with Prof Groves in 1982.

His dissertation, Toward a Discourse Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (1985), includes the first published algorithm for the determination of clause boundaries in Hebrew and raises the question of the adequacy of traditional Hebrew grammatical categories and notions in a computational world. It was also among the first to be printed at UCLA by a room-sized laser printer, using bitmaps of Hebrew characters created in consultation with the Department of Computer Science.

Kirk spent 15 years in Europe teaching pastors and church leaders in the then Communist bloc of Eastern Europe. After the fall of Communism, he became Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Budapest. He is fluent in German and Hungarian as well as in various biblical and ancient languages.

Kirk succeeded Prof Groves as Director in 2002. In 2009 the Groves Center was incorporated as an independent non-profit company with the generous support of Westminster Theological Seminary. Kirk was appointed President as well as Senior Research Fellow. He also continues as Adjunct Professor of Old Testament at Westminster, is the former Chair of the Computer Assisted Research Group (CARG) of the Society of Biblical Literature, and is one of the moderators of the B-Hebrew Internet discussion forum.