Wednesday, June 06, 2018

On Philip Davies

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION: Philip Davies (1945-2018).
By Thomas L. Thompson
Professor Emeritus
University of Copenhagen
May 2018

The death of my most dear friend Philip Davies on Friday, May 31, by cancer is a great loss to our entire field. He was not only a scholar of great talent and integrity, who interested himself in all that touched biblical studies. He was also ever a scholar of astonishing originality and discipline, whose impact on the field was immeasurable, not least because of the clarity of his arguments and his ability to focus on the rhetorical center of an issue. Who would have dreamt that such a simple distinction as that between the “biblical Israel”, the “ancient Israel” constructed by historians and the “Israel of the past”, which no longer exists, could have provoked a decade-long debate among biblical scholars, archaeologists, historians and theologians as Philip did in his 1992 essay, In Search of Ancient Israel?

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A personal memoir. The Bible and Interpretation website currently also has a list of the essays they published by Professor Davies. Scroll down to "Remembering Philip Davies 1945-2018."

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