David M. Carr

David M. Carr

David McLain Carr is Professor of Old Testament at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He is a leading scholar of the textual formation of the Hebrew Bible.Carr studied at Emory College, Carleton College, Candler School of Theology and Claremont Graduate School.Joshua Berman describes Carr's The Formation of the Hebrew Bible as a "convention-smashing" book in its use of epigraphic evidence to demonstrate that "many of the forms of editing routinely hypothesized by source critics of the Torah were not employed anywhere else in the ancient Near East."In Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins Carr, a Quaker and a committed pacifist, argues that the Old Testament was composed by the Jews in exile in Babylon and reflects their suffering as an exiled and oppressed minority group. Carr's argument has been criticized for ignoring the consensus among Biblical linguists that the Hebrew Bible was written in pre-exilic Hebrew that would have been impossible for scribes in the period of the Babylonian exile to replicate.


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