His maternal grandparents, Goodman's was from Chisināu, Bessarabia. In 1947, while he was still a graduate student, the excavation ofcaves near the Dead Sea was just beginning to unearth thousands of fragments of texts. He became one of the first American scholars to get access and spent twenty years painstakingly studying and translating a scroll of Leviticus, one of the books of the Torah. After earning his doctorate in 1948, he then held a series ofprofessorial and administrative positions at various theological institutions and universities. As the general editor of several distinguished series, including the Anchor Bible Series (1956-2008), Eerdmans Critical Commentaries (2000-08), and The Bible in Its World (2000-2008), and as the editorand author of numerous other award- winning volumes, including the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000), Freedman has produced over three hundred and thirty scholarly books. Recent seminal works as an author include The Unity of the Hebrew Bible (1991), Psalm 119: The Exaltation of Torah (1999), The Nine Commandments (2000) and What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls and Why Do They Matter? (2007). As editor of the Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition (1998), Freedman and his colleagues brought the world's oldest complete Hebrew Bible to synagogues, churches, libraries and individuals around the world for the first time in history.