NORMAN PORTEOUS was a distinguished Old Testament scholar who saw plenty of academic fashions come and go: he started teaching the subject in the 1920s. He spent almost all his career at Edinburgh University, where he was latterly Professor Emeritus. He was also a minister of the United Free Church of Scotland.

The Rev Professor Norman Walker Porteous was born in Haddington. He was educated at the Knox Memorial Institute, where his father was rector, and then at Old College, Edinburgh, where he studied classics and had his first taste of Hebrew. His education was interrupted by the First World War: he served in the Army in 1917-19, with the 13th Royal Scots.

In the 1920s he studied theology at Oxford and then in Berlin, Tübingen and Munster, where his teachers included Karl Barth — in fact he was Barth’s first English-speaking student. When he returned to Edinburgh he joined New College, studying Hebrew and Old Testament with Professor Adam Welch. In 1929 he was ordained minister in the United Free Church of Scotland, working as minister of Crossgates for two years.

Porteous was adept in systematic theology as well as the Old Testament, so it was an open question which discipline would claim him. The question was settled when St Andrews offered him his first chair, in Hebrew and Oriental Languages. In 1935 he returned to Edinburgh, where he held a chair until his retirement in 1968, aged 70. From 1964 he was Principal of New College and Dean of the Faculty of Divinity. In 1944 he received an honorary doctorate from St Andrews University. In 1954 he was President of the Society for Old Testament Study.

Throughout his career, the discipline was dominated by the basic hermeneutical question: how should study of the Old Testament relate to Christian theology? Is the scholar essentially a neutral archeologist of ancient texts, or a form of theologian? The question demanded reference to systematics as well as Hebrew studies, and led Porteous to engage with the seminal studies emerging from Germany, most notably those of Eichrodt and von Rad. Porteous took the view that an absolute methodological separation between theology and historical study was not necessary — indeed, it was impossible.

He understood his task as closely related to systematic theology or dogmatics: providing some of its ground work. Rejecting the idea of a purely objective biblical criticism, he argued that the reader should “enter into a living relationship” with the text, and pursue “knowledge of God” in the fullest sense.

His best-known publication was a commentary on the Book of Daniel, first published in 1962, and updated three times, finally in 1985. He argued that the book defies easy categorisation, and should be seen as “a distinctive piece of literature with a clearly defined witness of its own”.

He carefully highlighted its theological significance: as a meditation on the problem of Israel’s relationship to a potentially hostile world, and as one of the key texts in which a belief in the afterlife seems to emerge.

In 1929 he married May Hadwen, who died in 1981. They had three sons and three daughters.

The Rev Professor Norman Porteous, was born on September 9, 1898. He died on September 3, 2003, aged 104.