Hayim Tadmor

Hayim Tadmor was born in 1923 in Harbin

Hayim Tadmor was born Hayim Frumstein in Harbin, China, in 1923. His father, David, was a fur trader. In 1935, after his father died, he moved with his mother to Mandatory Palestine and finished school in Jerusalem.

In 1943 he began studying at the Hebrew University, focusing on classics and biblical and Jewish history. He completed his MA in 1950 and studied Akkadian in London and later in Chicago. His doctoral thesis, submitted in 1954, dealt with biblical chronology in light of Assyrian sources.

From 1958 he taught Bible and ancient Near Eastern history at the Hebrew University. In 1965 he founded its department of Assyriology and chaired it, and he became a professor in 1971. His main book, published in 1994, reconstructed the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III.

He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1985 and served as its vice-president from 1996 to 2004. In 2000 he received the Rothschild Prize. He married archaeologist Miriam Tadmor in 1953, and they had two children. He died in 2005.