This volume had its origin in a conference which was part of a Cambridge-based AHRC-funded Research Networking project entitled ‘“The Book and the Sword”: the Bible in the Experience and Memory of the First World War’. The title of the volume under review is more specific than that, having its focus exclusively on biblical scholarship rather than the place of the Bible among a more general public, military or civilian. Further volumes on the broader subject are promised.

In his helpful introduction, Andrew Mein is clear that the main focus of the volume is on the ways in which biblical scholars brought their expertise to bear on the crisis of war, as well as the ways in which the war had an impact on scholarship. The volume divides itself up into two major parts, broadly reflecting these dual concerns. The first of these concerns itself with individuals and institutions. Tomás Irish looks at how a world of biblical scholarship which was marked by interaction and cooperation before the war found itself severely divided once war broke out. Highlighting the battle of pamphlets, the most notorious of which was the so-called An die Kulturwelt, signed by ninety-three German academics, Irish shows how German and British theologians mobilised themselves in a battle of words. This led to some denigration of each others’ scholarship, though the British it seems were by and large less vitriolic than the Germans. Timothy J. Demy looks at what one might argue was one of the most direct contributions to the war effort by a biblical scholar, namely the actual participation in the war of the American-born, but naturalised German, Caspar René Gregory (the precise point of his essay is not immediately clear). Lukas Bormann examines the reaction of the famous semitist, Rudolf Kittel, highlighting ways in which his work during the war focused on an array of issues, including a defence of the Old Testament against anti-semitic attack and biblical ideas of the just war. Mark Chapman highlights William Sanday's response to the war. The latter had been a great supporter and advocate of German scholarship in the period leading up to the war and, while deeply critical of the Germany's decision to go to war, continued to remain a sympathetic supporter of German scholarship, for which he was much criticised, not least by more conservative theologians. Matthew Collins looks at two well-known Anglo-American biblical societies, SOTS and SBL, and their reaction to the war. SOTS was in fact formed in 1916 and after the war sought in a variety of ways to heal the hostilities caused by the war, not least by helping to bring back into publication ZAW (Die Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft). SBL similarly sought to ameliorate tensions in the post-war period.

In the second section of the volume attention turns to the way in which individual biblical texts and themes were studied during the war. Paul Michael Kurtz shows how scholars in different ways sought to overcome what would have appeared the obvious reading of the Fifth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, or embraced it in a pacifist way. Nathan MacDonald seeks to reignite interest in and respect for works on holy war published between 1914 and 1918, showing how the very fact of the experience of the war helped to elucidate themes in the Bible previously ignored. Andrew Mein addresses the stimulating subject of attitudes towards the Psalms, showing how various themes in the Psalms came to have a particular resonance, with scholars finding parallels between the context in which the creators of individual individual found themselves, and the current circumstances of nations at war. Susannah Heschel ponders the interpretation of the prophets from the different perspectives of the Jew Hermann Cohen and Ernst Troeltsch, contrasting their interpretations and showing how it highlighted strains in Jewish-Christian interaction rather than softening them. Jan Willem van Henten looks at the way in which ideas about martyrdom in the Bible were affected by the war through some micro-studies of individual scholarly volumes written during the period. James Crossley argues that the war set back the role of social scientific approaches to the Bible as a result of the rise of Communism and the sense that such approaches favoured the latter. Hugh Pyper shows how the different approaches to questions of war and pacifism taken by Harnack and by the Congregationalist C. J. Cadoux arose in part from the different social and religious contexts in which they found themselves. Although Cadoux's pacifist-oriented theology was sometimes strongly criticised, it was tolerated in part because he moved in a different polity from Germany in which conscience could outflank responsibilities to the state. In a stimulating concluding essay, Suzanne Marchand draws out what she takes to be some of the major themes arising from the book. She plays up the sense that some scholars felt of betrayal on the part of their German or British counterparts, sensed especially by the former as they had never expected the British to join the war. Inter alia, she questions the extent to which 1914–18 provided a caesura or Wendepunkt in the history of scholarship, though she accepts that the war could make scholars more sensitive to aspects of the Bible's content, a point made by MacDonald; and could, as Crossley claimed, serve to hinder the advance of particular methodologies. These ‘effects’ upon scholars contrast, she claims, with the effects of the war on Bible-reading and interpretation among soldiers, who by and large possessed their Bibles for talismanic reasons. The photograph on the cover of the Bible which prevented a bullet killing a certain Private Hackett, an event witnessed to on a number of occasions in the war, points at this in a suggestive way.

These essays, though hardly constituting a sustained thesis, show that the ‘mobilization of biblical scholarship’ from 1914 to 1918 is a subject worthy of study. How significant the contribution of such scholarship was to the war effort is impossible to know, and the volume would not lead one to elevate its significance. But the subject touches upon an array of interesting cultural, social, political and hermeneutical questions which will continue to merit attention.