[3] Furman University, his alma mater, awarded him an honorary doctorate (1993), and he served as editor of the prestigious Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series (1978–84).
A member of Phi Beta Kappa and a Guggenheim Fellow, he has also received fellowships from the Society for Religion in Higher Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Evangelical Scholarship Program, and grants from the American Association for Theological Schools and the American Council of Learned Societies.
[5] His first monograph, Prophetic Conflict (1971),[6] growing out of his article, "Popular Questioning of the Justice of God in Ancient Israel,"[7] signaled a lifelong interest in dissent and protest literature in wisdom and the Hebrew Bible.
[8] Throughout all these publications Crenshaw sought a deeper appreciation of biblical protest literature—particularly dissent in Job and Ecclesiastes—and to integrate it into the mainstream of modern religious discourse.
His important Defending God broadened the search,[9] while his commentaries on Ecclesiastes in the prestigious Westminster Old Testament Library series and Joel in the Anchor Bible narrowed it within specific literature.
[17] He launched the series Personalities of the Old Testament at the University of South Carolina Press to emphasize the beauty and profundity of the biblical literature.
[18] His literary output in Hebrew Bible scholarship has included nearly 200 articles in major journals, encyclopedias, and monographs, including a book of poems, Dust and Ashes (2010),[19] and major plenary addresses at the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament (Vienna, 1980; Cambridge, 1995), the Biblical Colloquium (Louven, 1978, 1998), the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, 1993), and the Symposium on the Language of Qoheleth (Louven, 2004).