Scenes from a Provincial Life: Memoirs of a Biblical Scholar

David J.A. Clines’s memoir, spanning eight decades, lets readers journey with him from a childhood in Sydney, Australia, to a prominent place as an eminent Hebrew Bible professor in Sheffield, England. It provides telling vignettes which encapsulate Clines’s academic life, transformed by the provincialness of his settings, his scholarly endeavours and international encounters.

Clines’s desire to serve as a steadfast companion to and high-level critic of the discipline of biblical studies is further revealed as he offers portraits of the giants whose shoulders he could stand upon, and the peers he stood shoulder to shoulder with. Such attention to his peer community bears witness to the truly remarkable outcomes of a polymath in humble mode.

A self-deprecating pioneer of postmodern approaches to biblical scholarship, Clines presents his memoir as “a heap of disjointed scenes—and certainly no grand narrative” and yet this belies the fact he provides expositions on how:
– he used negative experiences of education in childhood to refine what it was for him and his students to learn and to teach;
– being an early adopter of new ideas, in research and publishing, David and his colleagues became pivotal in championing innovation;
– his interest in philology and lexicography led to the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew project;
– his intrinsic wish for interpretative diversity was equal only to his wish for the substance of a text to remain in full view.

By revealing his unquenchable capacities as publisher, teacher, traveller, supervisor, researcher, commentary writer, philologist and lexicographer, readers will acquire a deepened insight into an exceptional scholar. His closing, unfinished chapter, “10 Things I Have Been Saying (but no one was listening)” reminds readers wherever there was sophism, speciousness and self-deception, Clines was most accomplished at sniffing it out and providing an illuminating deconstruction.