HOONACKER, ALBIN van. — Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Catholic University of Louvain, consultor to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, born at Bruges on 19 November 1857, died there on 1 November 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 training at Louvain, but in Old Testament criticism he was largely self-taught; he developed his expertise by thoroughly discussing the hypotheses of A. Kuenen and J. Wellhausen, two eminent representatives of liberal criticism.
He began his teaching and publications with extensive and detailed 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). His numerous contributions to the interpretation and 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 Une communauté judéo-arantienne à Eléphantine (1915), should be regarded as complements to his studies on the Hexateuch, from which his theory concerning the literary origins of the books of Moses developed. The first decrees of the Biblical Commission were unfavorable to him; H. therefore preferred not to continue his work in this field or to make known the results he had reached. These became public only in the posthumous work: De compositione litteraria et de origine mosaica Hexateuchi disquintio historico-critica (Bruges-Paris 1949). In general, H. adheres there to the theory of the existence of four documents in the Hexateuch (J, E, D, and P); but he tends to regard the Deuteronomic redaction as the latest, and is prepared to admit a Mosaic nucleus for these documents. In his view, however, what must be established and can be proved is not so much the Mosaic composition 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 deny Moses the promulgation of Yahwism and of the Decalogue.
H.’s second major work was the commentary on the Douze petits Prophètes (Paris 1908), included in Fr. Lagrange’s collection Études bibliques. There he engages in textual criticism in a personal and daring manner, several times with success; his exegesis, especially of the messianic texts, is likewise noteworthy.
Finally, H. became particularly interested in the books of Ezekiel and Isaiah. The version of Ezekiel was not published; that of Isaiah, however, was printed together with a commentary in Dutch: Het Boek Isaias (Bruges 1932). He also devoted several very important articles to Isaiah; H. ALZON, EMMANUEL D' (v.) is messianic according to the literal sense, as is also that of the suffering Servant of Yahweh. Personally, he was convinced that Is. 40–66 was inauthentic, but refrained from making his opinion known directly.
Posthumous publications by 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.