The recent death of Prof Robert Carroll at the age of 59 has deprived the world of Hebrew biblical scholarship of one of its most gifted and imaginative members. His best-known work is his massive commentary on the Book of Jeremiah.
Born in Dublin, a graduate of Trinity College, and always an Irishman, he nevertheless pursued his academic career in Scotland. After an Edinburgh PhD in 1967, he was appointed to an assistant lectureship at Glasgow University in 1968, and remained there, being appointed to a professorship in 1991. He could appear cynical and sardonic about university life, and hated committees, but he kept on being appointed to them, for his honesty and commitment were greatly valued by senior colleagues, non-academic staff and students alike.
He was not a churchman, and there were many in the Church of Scotland who were doubtful whether their ministerial candidates should learn about the Bible from one of such unusual views. Some could not cope; but those who persevered recognised the importance of Robert's questioning and probing, and valued the contacts which he maintained for years after they had graduated. He would have been amused to be called a pastor - too churchy a word; but it was a genuine pastoral office that he exercised. The general assembly of the Church of Scotland is to acknowledge the care he took with students.
His work on Jeremiah questioned the assumption that we can have access to the individual figure of the prophet; he saw the Book as in many ways fiction, using a life story to spell out a particular ideology to explain God's dealing with his people. But Robert wrote much more widely, challenging received assumptions, forcing his fellow scholars to think again.
The range of his own reading was enormous: literary criticism, a range of philosophy, ancient and modern, fiction from different cultures. In the Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, he wrote on poststructural approaches: new historicism and postmodernism.
His extensive bibliography contained nothing written by a member of the professional guild of biblical critics; Robert felt that their agenda was usually much too narrow. Nevertheless, he was appreciated by his fellows, and it was appropriate that the Society for Old Testament Study should invite him to become its president, an office he filled with quirky good humour in 1999. His work was mostly published by the SCM Press, and it was after a party to honour the retiring editor John Bowden, that he suffered a heart attack.
He is survived by his wife, Mary Anne, two sons and a daughter.
R.C.