David McLain Carr

David M. Carr is Professor of Old Testament/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 links of biblical scholarship with trauma theory and animal studies.

Most recently, building on lifelong experiences with animals and interest in animal science, he published Unmaking Eden: Genesis and the Domestication of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2026), along with an associated podcast, The Bible and the Living World: Conversations (hosted on Spotify, Apple Pod, where he interviews scholars that informed his work. This book draws on both the Genesis primeval stories and Indigenous traditions to argue for thinking of animal domination and human domination together. Rereading our relationships through these stories, we can see how both humans and animals are ever more subject to a common domestication logic that makes our worth dependent on our usability to those in charge. Yet that is not all. The Bible along with Indigenous traditions also offer alternative visions of multispecies personhood and kinship.

Carr's earlier books have focused on the formation of the Pentateuch out of earlier sources and layers, the oral-written scribal origins of biblical texts more generally, and the Bible as a document of survival and resilience. 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 made them last. The result of this basic insight is Carr's recent book, Holy Resilience: The Bible's Traumatic Origins (Yale University Press, November 2014).

His academic journey to that point started with dropping out of high school at age sixteen to attend college full-time and completing a BA in Philosophy at Carleton College 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.

Since then he has taught full time for multiple decades, first at Methodist Theological School in Delaware, Ohio (1988-1999) and subsequently at Union Theological Seminary in New York City (1999-present). Some of his publications have been directed to fellow specialists on the Bible, such as Reading the Fractures of Genesis (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2011). While other publications have been directed to a broader audience of students and the general public such as the above-mentioned Unmaking Eden: Genesis and the Domestication of the World (Cambridge UP, 2026) and Holy Resilience: The Bible's Traumatic Origins (Yale, 2014) along with The Hebrew Bible: A Contemporary Introduction to the Christian Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh (Wiley, 2021), and The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality and the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2001).

A father/stepfather of four, Carr rides (many) bicycles and plays funk-blues organ while living in New York City with his wife and fellow biblical scholar, Colleen Conway