NYT obituary for Moshe Greenberg

AN OBITUARY for Moshe Greenberg in the New York Times:

Moshe Greenberg, Biblical Scholar, Is Dead at 81
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: May 19, 2010

Moshe Greenberg, one of the most influential Jewish biblical scholars of the 20th century, died Saturday at his home in Jerusalem. He was 81.

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Professor Greenberg brought to the field a willingness to take what is known as the historical-critical approach to Bible study, which assumes that more than one author had a hand in writing the first five and many other books of the Bible.

“Jews were studying it in a traditional pious way,” said Jeffrey H. Tigay, the Ellis professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. The new approach, he said, “undermined the Jewish dogma of the whole Torah being given to Moses at one time.”

Professor Greenberg’s idea, which he called a holistic method, Professor Tigay said, was: “Let’s build on the idea of multiple authorship, but let’s not stop with unraveling the original components. Let’s figure out why the compilers put them together the way they did.” That method was central to Professor Greenberg’s extensive commentaries on the books of Exodus and Ezekiel, which analyzed how the multiple writers had woven their ideas into unified themes.

[...]

We worked a good bit with his Anchor Bible Ezekiel commentary this semester in our Master's seminar on Temple and Presence, which covered material from the Priestly traditions all the way up to the Merkavah mystics. The book of Ezekiel was a key element in the seminar.