JAMES BARR was one of the most significant Hebrew and Old Testament scholars in Britain in the past century.

Born in 1924, the son of the Rev Professor Allan Barr of Glasgow and Edinburgh, he attended Daniel Stewart’s College and Edinburgh University. From 1942 to 1945 he served as a pilot in the RNVR, and, after a two-year spell as a Church of Scotland Minister at Tiberias, he was appointed, at the early age of 29, Professor of New Testament at the Presbyterian College, Montreal.

He returned to Edinburgh in 1955 to occupy the chair of Old Testament literature and theology. And thus began an extraordinarily peripatetic career which took him to chairs at several universities, and to more visiting appointments overseas than any other scholar in his area of studies.

He was an inveterate traveller. At the same time he produced a steady stream of publications of considerable importance, and was throughout his life able to combine rigorous and fruitful scholarship with a most exacting social life. He accumulated honorary degrees and memberships of learned societies at a rate which, to lesser mortals, must have appeared bewildering.

His first book, The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961), was probably his most significant achievement. It was seminal in the true sense of that overworked word in that it successfully and pungently demolished a long tradition of attributing to words, and their real or alleged etymologies, an extra-linguistic significance they did not possess.

Theologians felt bereft having been deprived of that age-old prop of their profession, ie, the exegesis of concepts by means of semantic images and speculations. Barr made some enemies with this book, but once its importance had been recognised his scholarly reputation was firmly established.

From Edinburgh he went to a professorship at Princeton for four years, but in 1965 he accepted an invitation by the University of Manchester to fill the chair of Semitic languages. The principal product of this latter spell was his Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (1968). Again this was essentially a critical work rather than a piece of constructive composition. But he had once more recognised and exposed important flaws in the methodology of philological and exegetical work that were dismissed as trivial by the victims of his criticisms, yet his acumen was applauded by students of modern linguistics and the new wave of Bible scholarship.

In 1976 he moved to Oxford as Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, but two years later he achieved what must seem to anyone of his specialisation the ultimate goal, the Regius Professorship of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford. Curiously, concomitant with his entry upon this exalted office, his Hebrew muse seemed to have deserted him, for he now embarked on a series of studies mainly concerned with criticisms of fundamentalism or of the scope and authority of the Bible.

Yet there is little doubt that, in company with S. R. and G. R. Driver, Barr was probably the most significant Hebrew and Old Testament scholar in Britain in the past century. In 1986 he was invited to deliver the British Academy’s Schweich lectures which were published in 1989 under the somewhat unpromising title of The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible; yet they turned out to be immensely readable and influential. They also marked his temporary return to linguistic work.

In 1989 he retired from his Oxford chair, to the consternation of his colleagues, and transferred to a professorship of Hebrew and Old Testament at Nashville, Tennessee, where he was able to prolong his active career without a compulsory retiring age.

Among his further publications should be mentioned: The Typology of Literalism (1979); Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (1983); and History and Ideology in the Old Testament (2000).

For one who was so critical and sharp with his pen he was strangely reluctant to engage in serious oral debate and discussion, either on the details of his own work or on matters of academic concern in general.

Although he travelled more enthusiastically in other parts of the world than in his native Scotland, he remained a canny Scot, and throughout his life he played his cards very close to his chest. His fame and status as Hebraist and biblical specialist were worldwide, never open to serious challenge — and indeed richly deserved. It will be a long time before another Old Testament scholar and Semitist bestrides the academic world so effortlessly.

Barr is survived by his wife, Jane Hepburn, whom he married in 1950, and by their two sons and a daughter.

Professor James Barr, Hebrew and Old Testament scholar, was born on March 20, 1924. He died on October 14, 2006, aged 82.