Only Online: In Memoriam
James William (Bill) Whedbee, Ph.D.

Nancy B. Lyon Professor of Biblical Studies
September 24, 1938-January 22, 2004

The following is a series of excerpts from tributes to Professor Whedbee delivered during a celebratory memorial service held on the Pomona campus on February 15, 2004.

Use the Related Links at the left to read full versions of the memorials.

To be true to my word to Bill is to be true to Bill and to words. For words, charged with insight and feeling, vibrantly enriched by historical and literary study, animated by resonance with present times and our own lives, were at the core of what we shared, what he shared with us all. Bill was a man of his word, a man who loved words, a man of books who revered the People of the Book, who taught with unique brilliance and passion the Judeo-Christian sages and scribes, prophets and saviors, sinners and saints and their stories. The gift to me of our friendship was its chiming: Bill echoed the Bible, I echoed Shakespeare, and every conversation we had, no matter how sublime or mundane the topic, was a dialogue of such living voices, speaking to us as we wished them to speak to our students, an inexhaustible wealth of wisdom and beauty, caution and solace, mourning and celebration, laughter and tears.

—Professor Martha Andresen

Bill always undervalued himself. He often told me that he wouldn't have minded being an associate professor for the rest of his life.

But Bill wasn't anything but a Full Professor, a complete professor, as full and complete as a professor could ever be:

Full of Knowledge

Full of Generosity

Full of Kindness

Bill was simply and wonderfully Bill.

—Professor Stephen A. Erickson

I met you my freshman year in your Critical Inquiry Seminar. The syllabus for the class revolved around one central question: Is Love Stronger Than Death? I was scared to say anything in your class because with your white curls and big, darting eyes you looked like you could be a genius. I was a little afraid of geniuses then because I thought they could think right through me and see my secret mistakes.

In my first paper for you I used every big word I knew just to make sure I was as smart as all the other kids in the class. Just to make sure you knew I knew that you knew everything. You asked me to write the paper again using smaller words.

In each early morning class you managed to stir our sleepy minds into discussion, being careful to coax every voice out of hiding, always asking more than answering, letting silence sit if we needed to find a lost thought. If we were shy and stammering you made us human again by telling us about your long history of love lives, how when you were younger you went to church mainly for the girls. Suddenly I could picture you as a teenager with the same wide eyes and I breathed easier.

I asked you to be my advisor in my junior year because I knew I could tickle your brain with abstract inquiries about the meaning of the universe and the power of the aesthetic, but I could also tell you how I had a habit of driving the wrong way down one way streets or how I missed my family.

Professor Whedbee, you made me feel like a special person with unique talents worth sharing with the world. You showed me that the mark of true genius is not the ability to identify secret mistakes, but the capacity to quietly cultivate hidden beauty.

—Leslie Barnard '04

In his last words on the comic vision, Bill wrote, "...the comic vision contains a robust affirmation of life and revels in exuberance and excess... It shows how the comic eye can stare directly into the face of death and still see the surging powers of life and laughter."

Bill Whedbee was a comedian, gentle and compassionate. He lived exuberantly. He stared directly into the face of death and still saw the surging powers of life and laughter. His spirit would make the angels smile.

—Professor Jay Atlas

As our wedding day approached, Bill wrote this to one of the rabbis who married us:

"Certain key lines have often sprung up in [my]relationship [with Tamara] , often poetic lines that enliven and embody our love for one another. 'Love is as strong as death,' the famous quotation from Song of Songs, ... has embedded itself in our union. Both of us had known death intimately. ... Yet love has proved strong as death--not stronger than death, not negating fully the terror of death or its sense of separation, loss and wounding. Love has helped to keep us alive to life and to the possibility of renewed life--not as an easy panacea, but as a hard-won insight gained from living life fully even when staring death in the face."

I don't think I can begin to convey to you the kind of pervasive joy, the simple yet profound pleasure that permeated our life together, the sheer delight in just being together, sparked by a divinely fuelled love, and sharing everything possible in a "magical circle of transparancy and trust," to use Bill's words. And yet I suspect you can imagine that, knowing as you do Bill's passion for life, his vitality and his gentle, smiling affirmation of those around him - qualities that remained undiminished to the very day of his death. ...

Bill's voice continues to be heard, as the perennial invitation to each of us to blossom, to go forth, to see the world, to hear each other, to be enchanted by the literature that he so cherished and by the unquenched love of life that animated his very core to the very end.

"For love is as strong as death. ... Its sparks are sparks of fire, a flame of God [Yah], Mighty waters cannot extinguish love and rivers cannot drown it."

—Tamara Cohn Eskenazi

Now that he is gone, I am haunted by the elemental images of him here:

• the sight of my father looking up, slightly bewildered, amid the stacks of books and papers in his office;
• the rivulets of sweat pouring off his face after he'd finished a workout of intervals at the old track, its red earthen smudges still on his spikes at home;
• the sight of him and Reverend Davis watching our soccer game, distracted in part by God-knows-what theological discussion;
• my father in the classroom, his hands animating his subject, his eyes wide with excitement, and his jacket sleeve slightly covered in chalk, having just dashed off a line from the Song of Songs.

One day after hospice began, a social worker with a modern haircut and strident lipstick came to the house to visit someone she thought to be an enfeebled patient. We gathered in the living room. She asked my father whether he'd given any thought to spiritual matters and after-death issues. In a stately manner, my father crossed his legs. His eyes narrowed slightly and he said, "Do you mean in some way beyond the usual stereotypes associated with the afterlife?" At which point, he began something between a meditation and lecture that ranged deftly across the New and Old Testaments. "I like the image of the dying patriarch," he concluded, "who draws from the love and care of his family in this time of final suffering, but also imparts something of his knowledge and wisdom such that he might transcend the moment of death and live on in his community." The room remained hushed, all of us awe-struck. After a few moments, my father said he was tired and hoped that had answered her question. The social worker quickly folded up her things and left.

I'd like to say that he did transcend that horrible last chapter of suffering and grief. To the few who experienced his company in the last weeks, he never ceased to be the gentleman he'd been throughout. Gracious, funny, considerate. The sweep of his wandering brings you here today in the wake of his passion and affection. I hope that his legacy may continue, renewing itself among the people gathered in his memory. And like Jacob, I trust that he finally received his blessing and now finds himself in his own Cave of Machpelah, his spirit departed to the Garden.

—David Whedbee '91