Thomas Römer


Thomas Christian‏ Römer is a Swiss exegete, philologist and biblist, of German origin. After teaching at the University of Geneva, he became professor of the Old Testament at the University of Lausanne and, from 2007, held the chair "Biblical environments" at the Collège de France, of which he became administrator in 2019.

Biography

Career

Thomas Römer, born December 13, 1955 in Mannheim and raised in a practicing Protestant family, was very passionate about the Old Testament, intrigued in particular by its paradoxes. Without any particular vocation and like what was regularly practiced in Germany, he headed for theology. He studied theology and religious studies at the theological faculties of the University of Heidelberg and University of Tübingen. He studies biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic and other Semitic languages notably under the direction of Rolf Rendtorff, professor of Old Testament in Heidelberg, who encourages him to develop a thesis on the question of the Patriarchs in Deuteronomy and Deuteronomist story. During the preparation of this one in Paris where he arrived in 1980, he attended the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Catholic Institute of Paris and the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris - where his teacher was the exegete Françoise Florentin-Smyth - and obtained his doctorate in 1988.
This exhaustive thesis entitled Israels Väter is combining structuralist and historico-critical approaches, is part of the continuation of the work of John Van Seters. It postulates the controversial aim of the editors of Deuteronomy against certain Judean circles and that the Pentateuch is the result of an attempt to unify between two factions internal to post-Babylonian exile, split between the exiles returning from Babylon and the Jews who remained in the country and whose visions are expressed respectively through the tradition of the Patriarchs and that of the Exodus. This thesis innovates in particular by suggesting that the fathers mentioned in Deuteronomy are those of the Exodus and not the patriarchs, that the Deuteronomist editor considers that the only and true Israel is in the Golah, that is to say the exiles Babylonians, and that the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did not appear in Deuteronomy until the final writing of the Pentateuch.
At the invitation of Albert de Pury, met in Paris, Thomas Römer joined the University of Geneva where he became teaching and research master at the Faculty of Theology from 1989 to 1991, before teaching biblical philology and biblical exegesis until 1993.

University of Lausanne

From 1993, he was professor of biblical Hebrew at the faculty of theology and science of religions in the University of Lausanne, as well as at the Romand Institute of Biblical Sciences 12 which was attached to him. In 2003, he was contacted by French authorities, when Jacques Chirac tried to clarify George W. Bush's allusions to the biblical prophecies on "Gog and Magog" a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq, to which he gave a biblical note on this apocalyptic prophecy.

Collège de France

In 2007, at the invitation of the assyriologist Jean-Marie Durand, Thomas Römer was appointed professor at the Collège de France where he held the chair "Biblical environments": it was the first time that the term "Bible" appeared in a title of a research program of the College de France.
Since 2013, he has directed the UMR 7192 "Near East-Caucasus: languages, archeology, cultures". Became vice-president of the assembly of professors of the College de France in 2015, he was elected the following year a foreign associate of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, in the chair of the medievalist Peter Lewis.
His work has contributed to deeply renewing the understanding of the formation and dating of the Pentateuch as well as of the constitution of Jewish traditions on Abraham and Moses in particular. Thus, his work The So-Called Deuteronomistic History, published in English in 2005 and translated into several languages, marks a milestone in the history of Deuteronomist research. In January 2019, he made the cover of the popular science journal for the general public Sciences et Avenir for his philological and archaeological work on the Ark of the Covenant and his participation in excavations at the archaeological site of Kiriath Yearim.
On 1 September 2019 he was appointed administrator of the Collège de France, succeeding Alain Prochiantz. Of German and Swiss nationality, he became the first foreigner to head the Collège de France.

Historical-critical approach

Thomas Römer adopts an academic approach which combines historical criticism, literary and philological analysis of Old Testament texts, sometimes supported by archeology, seeking to detect the social, political or cultural circumstances which are the framework of the religious thought they generate., regardless of impact or contemporary theological readings. He notes that the writing of biblical texts constitutes a form of synthesis between identity conceptions and quite different theological conceptions and believes that this approach, which sometimes clashes with traditional representations, can serve both atheists and believers in their reflections on current issues.

Honors