With a heavy heart I share the news of E. Bruce Brooks’s passing. Alvin Cohen shared the following short obituary:

Born in Akron, Ohio, June 23, 1936, son of Ernest Arthur and Helen Brooks.  He attended Western Reserve Academy (1954) in Hudson, Ohio, and Oberlin College (1958).  He received his PhD at the University of Washington, Seattle (1968).  Taught at Harvard University and Smith College, then became Research Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, leading the Warring States Project from 1993 until he passed away on May 26, 2026.  He is survived by his wife and co-researcher A. Taeko Brooks, and his son Clement Brooks of Indianapolis.

His main research focused on the Warring States Period of China (fourth and third centuries BCE).  He showed that the texts of that period, traditionally regarded as written by single authors at specific dates, were “school texts” composed by different authors at different dates.  For example, the twenty chapters of the Lunyu 論語, traditionally ascribed entirely to Confucius, have a fundamental contradiction between ren 仁 and li 禮.  This led to his discovery that the chapters were each composed by different hands at different times over the period from 479 to 221 BCE.  See his The Original Analects (1998).  He further applied his analytic methodology to other Warring States texts.  The overall results appeared in his The Emergence of China (2015), which one reviewer said that it is the only book that shows how a society comes into being.

His studies resulted in the Brooks Index of Rhetorical Diction (BIRD), a research methodology that examines “functional words” to assess both the meaning and emotional message of sentences.  He was able to effectively apply the BIRD analysis to other languages and cultures.  Ultimately, he showed that all civilizations evolve from religious sacrificial to secular military power societies.  He passed away while in the midst of his research on the Old Testament for his book King David: From Sacred to Secular.

Bruce was deeply learned and passionate about his craft. His many insights and his personal example of dogged, convention-defying scholarship have influenced many of us over the decades. Our field is the poorer for the loss of Bruce’s singular presence.