Rolf Knierim Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

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.

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.

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.

A few of Knierim’s doctoral dissertation advisees included: Kent Harold Richards, SBL Executive Director Emeritus, Antony F. Campbell, George Blankenbaker, Marvin A. Sweeney, Yoshihide Suzuki, recipient of the 1990 Japan Academy Prize for his dissertation-based work, “A Philological Study of Deuteronomy,” and Mignon R. Jacobs, Dean and Professor of Old Testament at Ashland Theological Seminary.

Knierim’s impact on the development of form criticism was exerted not only through his leadership of the Old Testament Form-Critical Project and his editorial guidance of its signature publications, the volumes of the Forms of the Old Testament Literature Series, but also in the ripples of scholarly discussion set in motion by his landmark 1973 journal article, “Old Testament Form Criticism Reconsidered.” The essay was later described by Sweeney as representing “more or less of a coming of age of form-critical theory in that it moved well beyond past conceptualizations of the method.” Sweeney went on to say that “Knierim recognizes biblical texts as literary entities that are formed in the context of a societal or life setting in which typical sociolinguistic forms of expression function and convey meaning.” Similarly, David L. Petersen saw in the article the pivotal suggestion of the reformulation of form-critical programmatic consensus up to that point, consensus that had been “built on the foundations” going back to Hermann Gunkel.

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.

Co-editors: Gene M. Tucker (1966 through 1997) and Marvin A. Sweeney (1997 through 2016)

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.