We are pleased to publish this obituary of Gordon Wenham, written by his daughter, Lizzy Nesbitt on behalf of all four of his children.
Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham, best known for his commentaries on the Pentateuch and the Psalms, died in Cheltenham, England, on Tuesday, May 13, 2025, at the age of 81.
Early Days
Gordon John Wenham was born in Cambridge, England, in May of 1943, the oldest of four sons to John and Grace Wenham. His father, John Wenham, was serving as a curate at St Matthew’s Church in Cambridge, and soon after Gordon’s birth, he joined the RAF as a chaplain.
After the war, the family moved to Hadley Wood in North London and then, in 1948, moved to Durham. After the family moved to Bristol in 1953, Gordon and his three brothers attended Clifton College. John Wenham (1913–1996) worked at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, alongside J. I. Packer (1926–2000) and Alec Motyer (1924–2016).
After finishing school and gaining a science scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, Gordon felt called to study Theology, and spent time before going up to university studying Hebrew under Alec Motyer and then spent several months in Germany improving his command of the language. Gordon was encouraged by his father to see the use of his intellectual gifts as an important calling to serve the wider church.
While academic theology at the time was largely critical in its approach to the Bible, Gordon had learnt from his father that biblical criticism could be subjected to its own criticism, and enjoyed gently probing his lecturers about their own assumptions. His conviction was that the historically orthodox view of Scripture, held with integrity, offered coherence and clarity of conviction, which other views could not. He came first place in his year at Cambridge, achieving a double first (highest honors in two separate parts of the degree examinations).
Cambridge and Further Study
Over his summer holidays at university and afterward, Gordon traveled extensively in the Middle East. Digs in Jordan and Egypt, trips to his missionary aunt in then Persia, and visits to the Holy Land gave him a lifelong love for the world of the Bible.
After Cambridge, he began postgraduate studies at King’s College, London, working on the structure and dating of Deuteronomy. Part of his research was undertaken at the École Biblique in Jerusalem and at Harvard University.
During his time at Harvard, his involvement in the Inter Varsity Fellowship introduced him to some younger undergraduates, including Wayne Grudem (b. 1948) and Vern Poythress (b. 1946), who were encouraged by his faithfulness to biblical orthodoxy within the world of scholarship. Their paths intersected at various points throughout their lives in a way which continued to be a mutual blessing.
After completing his PhD in 1970, Gordon was appointed as lecturer at the Semitic studies department at Queen’s University in Belfast. Just before his appointment, he was introduced to Lynne, a close friend of his brother’s future wife, and two years later they were married.
Northern Ireland
Gordon and Lynne attended All Saints Church in Belfast, where three of their children were baptized. Many of the children’s godparents were friends from All Saints, or the Semitic studies department, or both.
Gordon began to supervise students in their own doctoral studies, a role he always enjoyed. Over the course of his career, he supervised over 30 doctoral students, many of whom went on to make significant contributions to the study of the Old Testament. (Cf. the tribute by one of those students, L. Michael Morales.)
Gordon was a natural polymath and, within the narrower parameters of Old Testament academic study, had a gift of understanding the essence of what his students were exploring and was able to ask them the questions that would lead them forward in their enquiry. With characteristic humility, Gordon was able to recognize when a student possessed gifts or insights beyond his own, and rather than being threatened by this, always saw others’ strengths as something to support and nurture for the sake of wider scholarship.
Gordon began writing articles for academic publication before starting at Queen’s. His first Bible commentary, on Leviticus, was published in 1979 when Gordon was 36 years old. Gordon’s capacity to work and serve and show generous hospitality to others relied on Lynne’s love and support, and the dedication of this commentary to her expressed this.
Gordon’s love of the Pentateuch led to him taking a special interest in issues surrounding the beginning and end of human life. While the Roman Catholic church actively spoke out on these issues, Gordon was clear that a commitment to evangelical faith should entail a commitment to speaking out for the unborn and the vulnerable. He was a strong supporter of Life UK and was instrumental in the setting up of the branch in Northern Ireland.
Gordon’s second book, on Numbers (1981), was dedicated to his parents, John and Grace, expressing the profound influence they had on his life of learning.
In 1980, when Grace died suddenly and unexpectedly, Gordon was drawn to return closer to family in England, and in 1981 began teaching at the College of St Paul and St Mary in Cheltenham.
Cheltenham, Family Life, and Writing
The college was set up by Dean Francis Close (1797–1882), an Anglican vicar, who planted many churches in Cheltenham and established church schools. The colleges of St Paul (for men) and St Mary (for women) were founded to provide teacher training with a clear Christian commitment, which was supported by a confessional theology department. While teaching undergraduates, Gordon supervised postgraduate students for degrees awarded through the University of Bristol. During Gordon’s time in Cheltenham, the college merged with another institution to create Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education. Later, after the college was awarded university status, Gordon was appointed as Professor of Theology.
One benefit of living back on the mainland was that trips to Israel only required one flight, rather than two, and Gordon began to lead regular study trips to the Holy Land. Gordon had a special love for the place where God’s salvation story was lived out, first through the history of Israel, and then in the incarnation. Gordon had a special love for the Jewish people, reflected in the inclusion of “our Jewish friends” in daily family prayers. Gordon saw, in the faithfulness of God to the Jewish people through history, the grounds for our Christian confidence in the faithfulness of God to all the promises we have in Christ.
Gordon and Lynne’s fourth child, Anne, was born in 1985 Cheltenham, and died in the same year. The first volume of Gordon’s Genesis commentary (1987) was dedicated to her, and the loss sweetened and deepened their commitment to the sanctity and preciousness of life. The second part of the Genesis commentary, published in 1994, was dedicated to his four children, citing Genesis 33:5 where Jacob introduces his children to Esau as “the children God has graciously given me.” At the heart of Gordon’s magnum opus was a reflection of where Gordon’s deepest ambitions lay: in the life of his family. Gordon paid little heed to any adulation or commendation, understanding that our heritage and legacy as parents is primarily our children, not our personal achievements. Similarly, Gordon fostered relationships he made within the academic sphere, not for the influence they gave him, but for a genuine joy in the meeting of heart and mind that he experienced there.
Just before the birth of their last child, Gordon initiated the habit of reading Psalms antiphonally with the family each morning. While this led to consternation about how late everyone would be for school when the Psalm was a long one, Gordon poured his lifelong love of the Psalter into the family culture. His evening blessing each night was from Psalm 4:8, “I will both lay me down in peace and sleep, for thou Lord only makest me dwell in safety,” a tradition inherited from his mother and in turn passed down to the next generation.
Bible Translation and the Psalms
Gordon’s writing about the Pentateuch continued with his book, Story as Torah, and his writing about the Psalms began to develop.
In 1998, a happy reuniting of friendships from a previous chapter led to his involvement in the Translation Oversight Committee for the English Standard Version, which included, among others, J. I. Packer, Wayne Grudem, and Vern Poythress.
Gordon saw in the five books of the Psalms deep resonances with the themes of the five books of the Torah and began to explore this theme in his writing. As a man of strong convictions and deep emotions, he called the church to embrace more deeply the depth of understanding expressed in the Psalms and the range of emotions it allowed faith to give voice to. In 2013, Gordon published a compilation of eight lectures he delivered between 1997 and 2010 on the practices of singing, reading, and praying the Psalms, paying special attention to the Psalter’s canonical structure, messianic focus, and ethical goal.
Gordon’s writing on lament was particularly personal as he grieved the partial closure of the Theology department in Cheltenham and the resulting redundancies. Gordon’s instinct was to stay and revive the department he had helped to build, but eventually trusted the advice given to him by a longterm mentor that in trusting God with the loss of what he had loved, he would find new pastures for faithful service.
After taking early retirement from Cheltenham, Gordon took up a part time role in Bristol alongside his brother David (b. 1945), where his father had taught when he was a child. Gordon’s commentaries often illuminated the chiastic structure of biblical texts, and in his return to Bristol, there was a real-life chiasm that gave resolution and purpose as Gordon continued to lecture, supervise doctoral studies, and write.
The Full Arc
After his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, Gordon stepped back from formal work but continued to be active in his local church. Embodied, communal worship was always at the heart of Gordon’s life and work and he served in the church at different points through preaching, praying, visiting the sick, leading the youth group, and serving as church warden. As his intellectual and physical faculties were constrained, Gordon found even greater solace and hope in the emotional spectrum of the Psalms.
Life lived in its full arc is a chiasm of its own:
from dust
to dependence
to growth
to flowering
to giving
to dependence
and then to dust.
Gordon walked in this story with great clarity, laced in the liturgy of the Psalms, knowing
that the gift of life and love is a miraculous gift to be treasured and stewarded;
that despite our limits, dusty people in the hands of an eternal God can have lives of weight and impact; and
that God can establish the work of quiet lives lived out of the limelight as we reckon on his faithfulness and make him our dwelling place.
Gordon J. Wenham died in clear hope that dusty lives, entrusted to Christ, the man of heaven, will be raised in glory.
