David Carr

David M. Carr is a Professor of the Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Over his decades-long academic career, he has become an international authority on the formation of the Bible, ancient scribal culture, and issues of the Bible and sexuality.

Decades into a career as a biblical scholar, he suffered a life-threatening bicycle accident that changed his view of the scriptures he had devoted his life to studying. As he grappled with his own individual trauma and survival of it, he became interested in how the collective trauma of Israel and the early church had shaped the Bible. 

He saw that these holy texts are defined by survival of communal catastrophe. This is part of what makes them special, what makes them last. The result of this basic insight is Carr's work, Holy Resilience: The Bible's Traumatic Origins (Yale University Press, Fall 2014) and he has written an introduction to the Hebrew Bible from that perspective, The Hebrew Bible: A Contemporary Introduction to the Christian Old Testament and Jewish Tanakh (Wiley Blackwell 2021), also published in abbreviated form as part of Colleen Conway and David Carr, A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible: Sacred Texts and Imperial Contexts (Wiley Blackwell 2021). 

His academic journey to the point of writing Holy Resilience started with dropping out of high school at age sixteen to attend college full-time and completing a BA in Philosophy at Carleton College at age eighteen in 1980. Eight years later, in 1988, he finished his Ph.D. with a focus on the Old Testament and Early Judaism at Claremont Graduate University.