Obituary – Professor Robert Hanhart (6 July 1925 – 11 July 2025)

On 11 July 2025, in Göttingen, Professor Robert Hanhart—the most distinguished Septuagint scholar of our age—passed away at the venerable age of one hundred. Only days earlier he had welcomed Reinhard Gregor Kratz and Felix Albrecht, who congratulated him on his centenary and laid before him, as a happy gift of the moment, the advance copy of the Festschrift Das Erbe der Göttinger Septuaginta prepared in his honour, which he received with evident delight. Hanhart’s scholarly legacy is one of immaculate philological precision and unwavering devotion to what he himself once called the “desert pilgrimage of textual reconstruction and textual history.”

Born in St Gallen on 6 July 1925, Hanhart read Classical Philology and Ancient History at Basel, earning his first doctorate in 1954 with a study of Joan of Arc’s image in French historiography, and secured a second doctorate at Göttingen in 1962 on the textual history of 2 and 3 Maccabees. He qualified as Privatdozent with his critical edition of Esther (1966), became außerplanmäßiger Professor in 1967, and in 1977 ascended to the chair of Old Testament with special responsibility for Septuagint studies, from which he retired in 1990. From 1961 to 1993 he directed the Göttingen Septuagint Project, overseeing the publication of John William Wevers’ Pentateuch and contributing his own editions of 2 and 3 Maccabees, the deuterocanonical books (Esther, 1 Esdras, Judith, Tobit, 2 Esdras) and, lastly, 2 Chronicles (2014).

Hanhart’s staunch allegiance to pencil and paper, his disdain for the digital realm, and his reverence for typesetters skilled in the classical tongues are bywords among scholars. In 2006 Hanhart revised Alfred Rahlfs’ celebrated two-volume Septuagint of 1935, thereby producing the now standard Rahlfs–Hanhart edition; henceforth his name is inseparably linked to the Greek Old Testament alongside that of Rahlfs. Honorary doctorates from Helsinki (1980) and Bologna (1999) acknowledged the global esteem in which he was held, and in 2009 he founded the Robert Hanhart Foundation to foster Septuagint research.

Yet formidable erudition was matched by warmth and wit. Generations of students remember his subtle humour, his love of Mozart, and the patient clarity with which he unravelled the knottiest problems of textual criticism. His flat in the Stift am Klausberg resembled more a library than a dwelling; only kitchen and bathroom escaped the encroaching shelves. In 2014, out of deep gratitude, he erected a dignified memorial to Alfred Rahlfs in Göttingen’s municipal cemetery, a gesture emblematic of his loyalty to the scholarly tradition he served.

With Robert Hanhart the field of Septuagint studies loses its longest-serving and one of its most illustrious editors, theologian and linguist of the highest rank, and as well a Swiss-born Göttingen savant of international renown. His editions will endure as benchmarks of philological excellence, and his legacy will live on through the work of his foundation. With profound gratitude, sincere esteem, and personal affection we bid him farewell; may he rest in the peace he long sought on his scholarly pilgrimage through the desert of texts.

Göttingen, July 2025