The Society for Old Testament Study was inaugurated in London on 3rd January 1917, and accordingly celebrates its Centenary in 2017. For one hundred years now it has been exercising its role—in the words of its Statement of Aims—as ‘a learned society of professional scholars and others committed to the study of the Old Testament’which ‘sees its task as serving the varying needs [of its membership] for support of their scholarly activities in Old Testament studies’ and ‘as having special responsibility for promoting Old Testament studies in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland’through such activities as ‘organizing meetings, commissioning and promoting publications,… and representing scholars of the Old Testament on other academic bodies’. The present volume marks the occasion of the Centenary of SOTS by looking back over these first hundred years of activities and developments, taking stock of various aspects of the Society at this point in time, and looking forward to further developments in the field of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible studies.

The contributors to this collection of centennial essays have all been long-serving officers of the Society, who between them constitute some sixty years of service to SOTS (or indeed seventy years, if the additional years on the committee as president-elect and past-president are included in the cases of the five presidential individuals among them): an unbroken sequence of Secretaries of the Society—David Clines (Secretary 1977–82 [and later ‘Foreign Secretary’2005–12]), Adrian Curtis (1983–88), Paul Joyce (1989–94), Katharine Dell (1995–2000), and John Jarick (2000–2009)—plus Ronald Clements (who served as ‘Foreign Secretary’1974–81) and Eryl Davies (who has served as the Society’s Archivist since 2012).