HOONACKER, ALBIN van. - Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Catholic University of Louvain, consultor of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, b. at Bruges on 19 Nov. 1857, d. there on 1 Nov. 1933. He was the most eminent exegete of the Faculty of Theology of Louvain after its restoration in 1834.
H. received his theological and philological formation at Louvain, but in Old Testament criticism he was largely self-taught and formed himself there by thoroughly discussing the hypotheses of A. Kuenen and J. Wellhausen, two eminent representatives of liberal criticism.
He began his teaching and his publications with ample and meticulous studies on the institutions of the Hebrews and on the composition of the Pentateuch: Le lieu du culte dans la législation rituelle des Hébreux (Ghent and Leipzig 1894); Le sacerdoce lévitique dans la Loi et dans l'histoire des Hébreux (London and Louvain 1899). The numerous contributions to the interpretation and the chronology of Ezra and Nehemiah, presented in 1896 in a work of great synthesis: Nouvelles études sur la restauration juive après l'exil (Paris 1896), and the monograph on Une communauté judéo-arantienne à Eléphantine (1915), must be considered as complements to his studies on the Hexateuch, from which his theory on the literary origins of the books of Moses developed. The first decrees of the Biblical Commission were not favorable to him; H. then preferred not to continue his work in this field and not to make known the results at which he had arrived; these became public only in the posthumous work: De compositione litteraria et de origine mosaica Hexateuchi disquintio historico-critica (Bruges-Paris 1949). In it H. generally links up again with the theory of the existence of four documents in the Hexateuch (J, E, D and P); but he tends to consider the deuteronomic redaction as the last, and he is ready to admit a Mosaic nucleus for such documents; but, in his eyes, what needs to be established and what can be proved is not so much the Mosaic redaction of the Hexateuch as the Mosaic origin of the fundamental beliefs and institutions of the Israelite people. In particular there would be no reason to refuse to Moses the promulgation of Yahwism and of the Decalogue.
H.'s second great work was the commentary on the Douze petits Prophètes (Paris 1908), included in the collection Études bibliques of Fr. Lagrange; there he devotes himself to textual criticism in a personal and bold manner, several times with success; likewise noteworthy is his exegesis, especially of the messianic texts.
Lastly H. interested himself more particularly in the books of Ezekiel and Isaiah. The version of Ezekiel was not published; of Isaiah, on the other hand, a version with commentary in Dutch was printed, Het Boek Isaias (Bruges 1932). He also devoted several very important articles to Isaiah; H. admits that the prophecy of the Emmanuel (v.) is messianic, according to the literal sense, as is also that of the suffering Servant of Yahweh. Personally he was convinced of the non-authenticity of Is. 40-66, but he refrained from directly making his opinion known.
Posthumous publications of H.: Le sens de la protestation d'Amos, VII, 14-15, in Ephemer. Théol. Lovan., 18 (1941), pp. 65-68; Quelques notes sur «Absolute und relative Wahrheit in der Heiligen Schrift», ibid., pp. 201-36.