Bruce K. Waltke is a Reformed evangelical professor of Old Testament and Hebrew. He has held professorships in the Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, and currently teaches at Knox Theological Seminary in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Waltke was born in 1930 in New Jersey to parents in the Mennonite Brethren tradition. He received an A.B. from Houghton College, a Th.M. and Th.D. from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has served as president of the Evangelical Theological Society, was on the translation committee of the New American Standard Bible[1] and New International Version,[2] and is an honorary member of the committee responsible for Today's New International Version.[3]
His books include Intermediate Hebrew Grammar, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, Finding the Will of God, Creation and Chaos, and commentaries on Proverbs (New International Commentary on the Old Testament, 2 vols.), Micah (Tyndale Commentary Series), and with C. J. Fredricks Genesis (Zondervan 2001, ISBN 978-0310224587), which was a winner of the 2002 Gold Medallion Book Award.[4] He was co-editor for the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, and he was the Old Testament editor for the Expositor's Bible Commentary series, the New Geneva Study Bible, and the Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible. More recently, he wrote An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach, which garnered an ECPA Christian Book Award in 2008.[5]
Waltke has travelled widely as a Bible expositor, as an Area Supervisor for excavations at Gezer, Israel, and as Director of field study trips to the Middle East and the Classical World. He is married and has three grown children.[6]
The festschrift The Way of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Bruce K. Waltke (Zondervan, 2000; ISBN 0-310-22728-3) was edited by J. I. Packer and Sven K. Soderlund.
In April 2010, news reports emerged alleging that Dr. Waltke was asked to resign his professorship at Reformed Theological Seminary because he advocated that evolution and Christianity were compatible in a video on the Biologos Foundation's website.[7][8] However, RTS Chancellor Ric Cannada later stated that this was not the case and that, in fact, Waltke had submitted his resignation without solicitation.[9] While Dr. Waltke himself has yet to clarify, he has said, "I find no fault with the RTS administration; in fact, I think they did the right thing."[10]