History and Ideology in the Old Testament: Biblical Studies at the End of a Millennium

James Barr's Hensley Henson Lectures for 1997, delivered in the University of Oxford and published by Oxford University Press in 2000 (198 pages, with bibliography and index). Written as biblical scholarship reached the end of a millennium, the book takes up the question of whether the Bible is historically reliable and the debates that had grown round it, including postmodernism and the use of the word ideology in biblical studies. Barr returns to redefine the term biblical criticism, and concentrates on examples from the history of Israel. The publisher describes its aim as to bring together the threads of these movements and to state a position for the coming millennium. It is among the last books Barr published in his lifetime.