Rolf Knierim

Rolf Paul Knierim (8 July 1928 – 29 September 2018) was a German American theologian and biblical scholar who specialized in the research of the Old Testament. He was a tenured Professor of Old Testament at the Claremont School of Theology and Avery Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University.

Knierim was a founding research project director at Claremont Graduate University's internationally esteemed Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, where he initiated and led the Old Testament Form-Critical Project, which produced the Institute's longest-running and most prolific publication series, the Forms of the Old Testament Literature (FOTL) Series.

In 1997, a ''Festschrift'' was published in Knierim's honor entitled, ''Problems in Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Rolf Knierim'', which included contributions from scholars such as Klaus Koch, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rolf Rendtorff, James A. Sanders, and Claus Westermann. Once a student of Gerhard von Rad and a former faculty member at the University of Heidelberg, Knierim's most noted scholarly contributions have been his influential role in fostering the global expansion and development of the discipline of form criticism and his methodological proposal that the task of Old Testament theology is by necessity a systematic one, a proposal he vigorously advanced in his seminal 1984 essay, “The Task of Old Testament Theology,” and in his more expansive 1995 multi-essay tome, ''The Task of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Method, and Cases.'' Provided by Wikipedia