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.
Life, education, and work Knierim was born in Pirmasens, Germany to parents Gottfried Knierim, a shoe factory worker, and Luise Knierim, née Buchmann. Knierim grew up in a family household deeply involved in the communal life of their local Methodist congregation, where his paternal grandmother had been a founding member. At the age of ten, Knierim signed up for school at the local Humanistisches Gymnasium, the classical high school in Pirmasens, where he received training in the reading of the classics, the study of Greek and Latin, and early exposure to the dialogue between humanistic pursuits and Christian thought.
In December 1943, the studies of 15-year-old Knierim at the Pirmasens Humanistisches Gymnasium were interrupted when, during World War II, Knierim was forcibly conscripted with his class into the German military and he was assigned to service as an air defense artillerist (Luftwaffenhelfer). In his essay "On the Subject of War in Old Testament and Biblical Theology," originally published in German, Knierim describes the experience of his own forcible conscription into the German military, alongside the parallel experience of his friend and fellow Old Testament scholar, Hans Eberhard von Waldow, stating that, “These experiences, followed by the impact of the Holocaust, or Shoah, profoundly influenced the direction of our lives, including our commitment to Old Testament studies.”
In March 1945, after a war-battered Pirmasens had undergone severe structural damage and numerous casualties among its citizenry, Knierim was captured by American forces, interrogated, but then sent home. In the fall of 1946, area schools reopened. Surviving years of hunger pervasive in the still war-involved region at the time, Knierim completed his schooling at the Pirmasens Humanistisches Gymnasium, and passed final exams, earning his diploma in the summer of 1948.
Soon after receiving his diploma, Knierim left Pirmasens to pursue training for church ministry, and subsequently received a pastoral assignment and was stationed at Pforzheim, Germany. At the age of 21, after completing two years at Marbur/Lahn-Wetzlar in central Germany, Knierim went on to receive further training at the Methodist seminary in Frankfurt/Main.
In 1951, Knierim moved to Heidelberg, Germany to continue his studies at the University of Heidelberg. In Heidelberg, Knierim shared a room with Manfred Hoffmann, who went on to later become professor of church history at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. While at Heidelberg, Knierim interacted with prominent scholars, including: Gerhard von Rad, Gunther Bornkamm, Heinrich Bornkamm, Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen, Edmund Schlink, and Peter Brunner. Knierim studied at the University of Heidelberg under the tutelage of Old Testament scholar, Gerhard von Rad. On May 7, 1955, Knierim passed his comprehensive exams at the University of Heidelberg.
On June 2, 1955, Knierim married Hildegard Salm in Edenkoben, Germany. Twenty years earlier, Rolf and Hildegard had met as students in the same class of first and second graders and had walked home together daily after school.
In July 1955, the couple moved into an apartment atop the chapel at Eutingen where Knierim had been assigned for his first year as a pastor to serve the three villages of Eutingen, Öschelbronn, and Wurmberg, Germany. While there, Knierim published a reflection in the church newsletter addressing his congregation entitled, "Biblishes Denken" [biblical thinking], a piece he mentions in the foreword of his 1995 book, The Task of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Method, and Cases. There, years later in the opening of the 1995 book, one of the culminating works of his career, he noted that although he had become “involved in the scholarly side of the task” in his professional life over the decades that followed his pastoral service, a view had persisted for him through the years, namely that he had ”never believed that biblical thinking is reserved only for the scholars.”
Knierim and his family moved to Saarbrücken in 1956 where he was assigned a small congregation to pastor, and he worked on his doctoral dissertation at the invitation of Gerhard von Rad, his mentor. In 1957, Knierim was ordained as an Elder of the Methodist church at the annual conference at Pirmasens, and he obtained his Dr. Theologiae,. Soon thereafter, Knierim received a postcard from Gerhard von Rad wherein von Rad offered him a university position, and effectively “changed the direction of Rolf’s career from the practical field of ministry in the German Methodist Church to the academic field of teaching the Old Testament at the University of Heidelberg.”
While at Heidelberg, Knierim served in a range of roles as a pastor, hospital chaplain, assistant to Claus Westermann and Gerhard von Rad, Privatdozent teaching Hebrew and seminars for beginning students, and an Old Testament faculty member.
In 1963, Knierim earned his Habilitation at the University of Heidelberg. In 1964-65, Knierim was invited to serve as visiting professor at the Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California. Knierim was then offered a dual professorship at the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California, which he accepted.
In 1966, Knierim joined the faculty of the Claremont School of Theology as Professor or Old Testament and the faculty of Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University) as Professor of Religion. Over the course of his work as a professor at Claremont, Knierim supervised over 30 doctoral students to the completion of their PhD dissertations and served as an adviser to numerous MA students.
At Claremont, Knierim was a founding project director at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (IAC), initiating the Old Testament Form-Critical Project, and formally chartering the Forms of Old Testament Literature (FOTL) series with Gene Tucker in the spring of 1966. In November 1967, Knierim participated in the organizational meeting of the IAC Research Council, alongside five others: William H. Brownlee, James M. Robinson, IAC founder; Ernest Cadman Colwell, first director of the IAC; Hans Dieter Betz, and Loren R. Fisher. Knierim continued as IAC project co-director with Gene Tucker, and later through his retirement with Marvin A. Sweeney.
In 1997, a Festschrift was published in Knierim's honor, Problems in Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Rolf Knierim. Knierim's Festschrift included contributions from scholars such as Klaus Koch, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rolf Rendtorff, James A. Sanders, and Claus Westermann. Notably contained in the Festschrift's opening pages were two works that offered rare insights into the larger historical and biographical context of Knierim's work: the book's foreword by James M. Robinson, and the detailed factual biographical narrative authored by Hildegard Knierim containing material spanning a timeframe of over five decades, and having as its setting Claremont, California and key locales in Germany, Knierim's country of origin.
After his retirement from his post as a professor at Claremont, Knierim continued to contribute to ongoing discourse in the fields of Biblical and Old Testament studies. On November 22, 1997, at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco, California, a panel of leading Biblical scholars convened to engage in a discussion with Knierim concerning his landmark 1995 book, The Task of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Methods, and Cases. In 2005, Knierim co-authored with George W. Coats, Numbers, volume IV of the Forms of the Old Testament Literature series, one of the last volumes of the series.
On September 29, 2018, Knierim and his wife, Hildegard, were killed in a car accident near Winslow, Arizona while returning home to Claremont from a vacation in New Mexico.
Contributions and scholarly impact
Form criticism
As a former student of Gerhard von Rad, a noted German scholar of the form-critical method, Knierim was regarded as being especially well-positioned to bring continental formgeschichte to the United States. Knierim's establishment of the Old Testament Form-Critical Project represented a key step in the establishment of form criticism as a leading exegetical methodology in 20th-century American and international biblical scholarship. Enlisting a global team of researchers, the Forms of the Old Testament Literature (FOTL) series carried forth the form-critical discipline developed over several generations by German biblical scholars as its volumes also evidenced new developments, for instance a departure from a characteristic pre-World War II exegetical focus preoccupied nearly exclusively with diachronic concerns, to a more synchronic one, moving the field well beyond its previously prioritized analytic parameters.
In describing the reasoning behind the establishment of the Old Testament Form-Critical Project, Knierim revealed that the project had been founded "in order to make it possible to establish the field of form-critical research on the Hebrew Bible as an exegetical discipline in its own right besides the exegetical disciplines practiced at the time in the United States and the English-speaking world." On the centrality of the Forms of the Old Testament Literature (FOTL) series, the signature publication of the Project, written by an international team of Old Testament scholars assembled and coordinated for over four decades by Knierim with series co-editor Gene Tucker, and later with co-editor Marvin A. Sweeney, James M. Robinson remarked that “the ongoing dialogue among its [FOTL] editors has become de facto the center of Old Testament form-critical theological scholarship in America.”