James Barr

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

Quotes

• We shall work not on the macrocosmic scale of the literary forms, but on the microcosmic scale of the lexical forms.
  • Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament, p. 10

• This book is therefore consecrated to the deeper and fuller study of that linguistic world in which the Hebrew Bible is set.
  • Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament, p. 304

• The problem here is not so much a historical one, more a terminological and philosophical one.
  • The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible, p. 92

• 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:
  1. creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience
  2. 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
  3. Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark.
  • Letter to David C.C. Watson, 23 April 1984. Quoted from https://answersingenesis.org/
  • Website of Stephen E. Jones, appearing to contain full letter (archived on archive.org): link