Z Books Around the Web - A Brief History of Old Testament Criticism

Check out this post from Louis McBride, who discussed how war transformed the lives of Old Testament scholars Gerhard Von Rad and William Foxwell Albright

"This past week I read A Brief History of Old Testament Criticism by Mark S. Gignilliat. I thought the book was an excellent introduction and overview of some of the towering figures in Old Testament scholarship. But one of the things that I found especially interesting was learning about the personal lives of these men. For two of these men their scholarship was interrupted by a stint of military service. We sometimes forget when we are discussing the views of this or that scholar that they lived actual lives and it wasn’t always pretty...

...Two brilliant scholars, two horrific wars. They survived, many didn’t. We immediately think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was a casualty of war though not as a soldier. One of the things Gignilliat’s book did for me was to put flesh and bones on people who were before merely names of a page and figure heads of certain theories of Old Testament criticism. He says in the Introduction that he does “not want to make villains of the usual suspects in this volume. In fact, the reader may sense my deep sympathies for the intellectual and spiritual difficulties faced by some of these figures.” (14) On that point I think he succeeds and admirably so."

You can read the rest here.