First, there are the ‘ancient versions’ of the OT, which traditionally consist of the Greek ‘Septuagint’, the Aramaic Targums, the Syriac Peshitta and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. These, and especially the Septuagint, are regarded as primary witnesses to the biblical text, and they all predate by some centuries the majority of the Hebrew manuscripts on which our translations of the OT into English are based. My earliest work was done on the Targum to the Twelve (‘Minor’) Prophets.

Originally I had planned to work on the Hebrew text of the book of Zechariah for my PhD, but decided, after reading Benedikt Otzen’s Studien über Deuterosacharja (1964), that it was too early to be revisiting that part of the canon. While casting around for an alternative topic, and at the prompting of David Winton Thomas, who had been one of my teachers before his retirement in 1968, I began to look at the Targum to Zechariah and then at the Targum to the other prophetic books nearby. My supervisor for the dissertation was John A. Emerton, who succeeded Winton Thomas as Regius Professor of Hebrew in 1968. Targum has run like a thread throughout my subsequent work, though the bulk of it has been in other areas.

Soon after taking up my first appointment, at Glasgow University in 1969, my departmental head John Macdonald passed on to me the responsibility for editing the Syriac books of Chronicles, in the Leiden Peshitta project. The collating of approximately thirty Mss, with long chapters containing genealogies and multiple variants of the names in their Syriac form, stretched out over the next twenty-five years, and was often experienced as a mild toothache that refused to go away. As the project guidelines were modified now and again in favour of a more economic presentation of data, much of my collated material became surplus to requirement and did not appear in the eventual published volume (1998). The publication in 2019 of my translation of the Syriac of Chronicles in the Antioch Bible series (Gorgias Press) has offered a late opportunity to redeem some more of the time spent on the strangely free and not particularly ‘literary’ rendering of these books in the Peshitta version.

I have not published so much on the Septuagint, the importance of which I first learned in my school days in Belfast when I got to know David W. Gooding, who became Professor of OT Greek at Queen’s University. It was through him that I discovered the importance of the ground-breaking work of Dominique Barthélemy in his Les devanciers d’Aquila (1963). It is the first title that comes to mind when I think of books that have made a difference in biblical studies (in the broader sense). My contribution to Septuagintal studies has mainly been refracted through some of my PhD students—accounting for about a dozen of the total—who have worked in that area, sometimes on topics that I realised I would never have time to follow up myself. My interest in the ‘ancient versions’ easily extended to modern Bible translations, and I have had involvements in three Bible translation projects, viz., in decreasing order of involvement, The Revised English Bible, The New International Version, and The English Standard Version.

The other main areas of interest have been OT commentary and exegesis, Israelite prophecy, the OT in its ancient near eastern context, and the ‘afterlife’ of the OT in the New Testament and in later Christian writings. Exegesis is principally represented in the commentary on the books of Samuel (1986) and a number of spin-off chapters and articles arising from the commentary. Not surprisingly, an interest in biblical narratology is reflected in some of the output. OT prophecy is still a major interest, with my current preoccupation the writing of a volume on Amos for the rejuvenated International Critical Commentary series. As the 2013 volume Thus Speaks Ishtar of Arbela suggests, prophecy and the near eastern context of the OT come easily together. The ‘afterlife’ of the OT is represented in, for example, the commentary on Hebrews, in the introduction to the second edition of which I elaborate on the significance of the supersessionism in Hebrews for contemporary debate about Judaism and Christianity. Holy Land, Holy City (2004) is based on the text of the 2001 Didsbury Lectures and strays still further into Christian (and Jewish) history and tradition. The freedom to range more widely than usual made this perhaps the most enjoyable writing-up experience in my career, and at the time I wished that I could have given more extended treatment to the theme of ‘sacred geography’ in the Bible.

Having lectured on Genesis 1-11 to Cambridge theology students for many years, I have more recently written up a few articles dealing with aspects of these foundational chapters. An overview, written simply and for a non-specialist readership, is presented in the Grove booklet, Genesis 1-11 in its Ancient Context (2015). This brings me to current projects and future possibilities, these all depending on the successful completion of the commentary on Amos, which belongs in a series known for its substantial word-count and heavy-duty scholarship (‘Let the reader beware!’). There are several projects on which some work has already been done, a few of which will be mentioned here. Some reflections on modern Bible translations were presented in a lecture given at Tilsley College, Motherwell, Scotland, in December, 2017, and these, much revised and augmented, have been published as a chapter in a Festschrift volume, under the title ‘Uneasy Lies the Head’ (2021). I have also gathered reams of material for a monograph that will compare and contrast translation policy and praxis in the ancient versions and their modern counterparts in English. There is also an informal agreement to write a theological commentary on the book of Micah, and I have done some preliminary work for a monograph on the subject of forgiveness in both Testaments.

For a long time I had planned to write a monograph on ‘early Genesis’, but have decided against adding to the cascade of publications that have already appeared. Instead, but still arising from involvement with ‘early Genesis’, I have been pursuing a broader interest in the scientific awareness reflected in the Bible. This topic provokes regular jousting contests between contemporary apologists for faith and non-faith, as does the other big issue of morality, the basis for it and biblical approaches to it. While I regard this latter question as ultimately more challenging, I am especially interested in the perennial ‘Bible and science’ debate. It is obviously important to establish as best we may what the biblical authors actually knew, or are likely to have known, before introducing modern science and its claims. The already-mentioned Grove booklet and the Festschrift article ‘The Week that Made the World’ (2007) are lite-bite approaches to the subject. One of the problems for the OT specialist is that the biblical material comes across as primitively simple by comparison with the complexities of ‘real science’. One effect of this is that both its detractors and its apologists can be tempted into patronising the texts, with careless generalisations and dismissals in the one case and eager over-sophistications in the other, in order to demonstrate hidden depths in the text. Both equally deserve a short shelf-life. It seems pretty obvious that ‘biblical science’ needs to be properly described, or ‘mapped’, before we discuss its relationship to science as we think we know it. Yet even with all the provisos, caveats and qualifications that might be entered, a meaningful role can be defined for this ‘biblical science’, granted that the biblical writers are principally engaging with the higher questions of ultimacy that science cannot answer.

The list of publications on the main page includes a handful of reviews from among some hundreds of reviews and (especially) review notices that have been written.