James Barr's The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961) is one of the most influential and groundbreaking works in 20th-century biblical studies. It is a trenchant critique of the methods used in biblical theology at the time, which often misused linguistic evidence (Hebrew and Greek) to form theological interpretations. Barr aimed to criticize modern theological thinking, which often derived theological concepts solely from the morphological (word forms) and syntactic (word order) mechanisms of biblical language. He argued that many Evangelical scholars mishandled linguistic evidence, hindering sound biblical interpretation. This book marked the end of a period in which biblical theology relied heavily on the study of individual words (etymology).