James Barr Quotes

British bible scholar (1924-2006)

Rev. Professor James Barr (20 March 1924 – 14 October 2006) was a Scottish Old Testament scholar.

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The problem here is not so much a historical one, more a terminological and philosophical one.

#creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience

#Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark.

Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that:

#the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story

This book is therefore consecrated to the deeper and fuller study of that linguistic world in which the Hebrew Bible is set.

We shall work not on the macrocosmic scale of the literary forms, but on the microcosmic scale of the lexical forms.