Ivan Engnell : En bibelforskares bana

Ivan Engnell (1906-1964) was 1947 appointed professor of Old Testament exegetics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. He introduced the study of the Old Testament in Sweden from a purely religio-historical point of view. His dissertation Studies in the Divine Kingship in the ancient Near East (1943) was a pioneer work, in which he investigated the sacral kingship in the mythological texts from Ugarit. Engnell was a firm adherent of the Patternist school. His view of the emergence of the Old Testament can be studied in Gamla Testamentet. En traditionshistorisk inledning (1945). His main work is Svenskt bibliskt uppslagsverk (1962), an exegetical handbook covering the whole Bible, in which all the major articles about the Old Testament are written by himself and his opinions are presented in an often rather biased form. Engnell is often said to have founded the so-called Uppsala school; however, he had few followers in his scholarship. His teaching seems to have been charismatic and since the majority of his writings are in Swedish his influence was particularly strong in Scandinavia.