The most important American Old Testament scholar of the last century is Norman Gottwald

Norman Gottwald died in March at age 95. He is, in my judgment, the most important and influential Old Testament scholar of the 20th century in the United States.

The only other near candidate for that is Brevard Childs, who died in 2007. In 1979, both scholars published discipline-redefining works: Gottwald’s The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE and Childs’s Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. In very different ways, both were moving beyond the conventional historical social criticism that had dominated study in the modern era. It was characteristic of Gottwald’s generous, irenic way that he published an article in the October 1985 issue of Theology Today showing how his work and that of Childs could be held together in a useful, critical way.

The Tribes of Yahweh is of durable significance because it reads the Old Testament with reference to the interpretive categories of the social sciences, notably the function of economics. Specifically, it focuses on the book of Judges and the tribal configuration in Israel before the emergence of the monarchy. Gottwald reviews and rejects the notion that there was a violent conquest of the land by the invasive, intrusive Israelites from Egypt. In like manner, he reviews and rejects the German hypothesis that the land was settled by immigrants.