For twenty-three years, William Brownlee was a Professor of Religion at the Claremont Graduate School and Professor of Old Testament at the School of Theology in Claremont.  For seventeen of those years, he was my colleague.  I knew him to be a loyal friend, a colleague whose scholarly achievements brought worldwide attention to Claremont, and a man of deep personal piety and faith whose focus on the Hebrew scripture was not merely a matter of intellectual interest but a matter of a love from the heart.  In the finest tradition of the Christian scholar, he combined intellectual excellence and personal dedication to produce scholarly work, a listing of which occupies more than thirty pages.  His interests ranged widely over the literature of the Hebrew scriptures, but perhaps his most important work was that which he did on the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Along with John Trever and Millar Burrows, he published the Dead Sea Scrolls of the St. Mark’s Monastery (2 volumes) and translated the Dead Sea Manual of Discipline.  He did the first  translations of the Dead Sea Habakkuk Commentary. 

Claremont School of Theology

 In 1964, he published what was to become his most popular and widely acclaimed work, The Meaning  of  the  Qumran  Scrolls for  the Bible, with  Special Attention  to the Book of Isaiah. Throughout his work on these scrolls, Bill’s intellectual curiosity, his careful attention to detail, and his penetrating scholarly insights created excitement in the scholarly world and in the communities of faith.  Eager for new light on the ancient scriptures and filled with excitement about the possibilities of the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls, people by the thousands flocked to see exhibits of the scrolls, and they read with rapt attention the work which Bill produced.....
     Bill was a loyal friend.  Though he and I often had sharp disagreements about international politics, particularly with respect to the problems in the Middle East, those disagreements never in any way qualified the warmth of his colleagueship.  He was a man who had strong opinions but was quite able to accept and to respect contrary opinions from those whom he regarded as his friends and colleagues.
     Bill was a faithful member of the Claremont Presbyterian Church and was active in all phases of the life of that congregation.  he had, after all, begun his career as a pastor of the United Presbyterian Church in Newton, Kansas, in 1942.  The sense of call that led him there never left him.  When he turned his mind increasingly to scholarship, he never forgot that his interest in the scripture was rooted in his faith in God, and that that faith came to expression most powerfully in his regular practice of personal piety and worship.....

from William H. Brownlee, Word Biblical Commentary: Ezekiel 1-19, vol. 28 (Waco, TX:  Word Books, 1986):  viii-ix.