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[German Version] (Jan 8, 1900, Wilhelmshaven – Jul 12, 1987, Tübingen) was an Old Testament scholar who studied in Berlin and Jena, where he received the Lic. theol. in 1921. He earned his Dr. phil. in 1923 with a dissertation in ancient Near Eastern archaeology, and gained his Habilitation himself in Berlin in 1925 and Halle in 1928. Galling was interim director of the commission of the Deutsches Evangelisches Institut für Altertumswissenschaften des Heiligen Landes (German Protestant Institute for the Study of the Holy Land in Antiquity) in Jerusalem in 1930. He taught in Halle ¶ (1930–1…

[German Version] (Apr 7, 1683, Hildesheim – May 8, 1715, Hildesheim). After a brief period teaching in Helmstedt, Witter was appointed pastor in Hildesheim in 1707. He had been influenced ¶ …

[German Version] (Feb 26, 1763, Sehna, Thuringia – Sep 17, 1834, Berlin). In 1789 Ilgen became rector of the municipal Gymnasium of Naumburg/Saale; in 1794 he became professor of Near Eastern languages and (after 1799) theology at Jena. From 1802 to 1830 he served as rector of Schulpforta, which under his leadership was transformed from a princely school of Saxony into a Prussian Gymnasium. In his major work, Die Urkunden des Jerusalemischen Tempelarchivs in ihrer Urgestalt (part 1, 1798), he expanded the earlier documentary hypothesis (Pentateuch) by identifying in Genesis, besides t…

[German Version] I. In preexilic times the expression “people of YHWH” denoted the state and people of Israel (People and nationhood: II). In the crisis in ancient Israelite YHWH religion that began with the defeat of Samaria in 722 …

[German Version] a family of Basel academics …

[German Version] (Mar 19, 1684, Sauve, Languedoc – Mar 5, 1766, Paris) belonged to the Christian branch of a Jewish family that had lived for centuries in southern France. He was the son of a Huguenot pastor who converted to Catholicism when the Edict of Nantes was revoked (1685) but became a Protestant again before his death. Originally trained as a physician (professor of medicine at T…

[German Version] (Feb 28, 1815, Mulhouse, France - Jul 16, 1869, Meißen), a theologian and orientalist, worked as private tutor in Paris from 1839 to 1843, as teacher of Hebrew and French in Meißen from 1847 to 1868, and was awarded the title of professor in 1852. Graf's lasting contribution to OT studies, developed in cooperation with A. Kuenen and J. Wellhausen, was the establishing of a late date for the Priestly Document, which had until then been regarded as the oldest textual source of the Pentateuch and been designated as a base document ( Grundschrift). Taking up on a suggestion made by his teacher E. Reuß, Graf was able to demonstrate that the legal sections of P in the books of Exodus and Numbers are younger than Deuteronomy ( Die geschichtlichen Bücher des Alten Testaments, 1866). While Graf initially still regarded the narrative passages in P as “a history book of the Elohist” and thus excluded them from the late dating, he eventually allowed himself to be convinced by the arguments of Kuenen with respect to the coherence of historical narrative and legal sections …

[German Version] (Mar 21, 1877, Mölln – Apr 6, 1927, Chicago, IL) studied theology and ancient Near Eastern languages in Greifswald, Göttingen, Marburg, and Kiel with Friedrich Giesebrecht, J. Wellhausen, R. Smend, O. Baumgarten, and J.F.W. Bousset; he received his Dr.phil. in Göttingen …

[German Version] (Sep 4, 1841, Plauen, Vogtland – May 7, 1910, Halle/Saale), Protestant theologian and scholar of ancient Near Eastern studies. After his graduation as Dr.phil. (1863) and Lic. (1868) in Leipzig, Kautzsch began his career as a school teacher and gained his Habilitation in Old Testament exegesis in 1869. He lectured with great success in Leipzig, Basel (from 1872), Tübingen (from 1879), and Halle (from 1888), where he officiated as rector in 1898/1899, a…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies People and nationhood are functional political terms that serve to define a collective entity and to incorporate it into a specific context (see III below). Only since the 18th century has it been possible to speak of a German nation as the active subject of its own history. The rupture of the church at the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion in the 16th and 17th century long prevented the development of an inclusive political or religious identity. It …

[German Version] I. History of Religions – II. Old Testament – III. New Testament – IV. Judaism – V. Christianity I. History of Religions Immediate and comprehensive solidarity appertains only in the most …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies Tolerance and intolerance must be defined in terms of their relationship to respect, coexistence, indifference, acceptance, and prejudice. In the public context, they ¶ correspond to the presence or absence of freedom of religion. They originate in the claim to exclusive religious truth or else collide with it. Tolerance requires insight into the human ability to err and into the limits of human cognition with regard to faith, whereas intolerance rejects this insight. Following Gerlitz,…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies 1. The terms The terms rite and ritual are often used synonymously, both in daily speech and in the specialized language of religious studies, leading to a lack of clarity. “Rite” is etymologically related to Sanskrit ṛta, “right, order, truth, custom,” and may thus be regarded as the “smallest” building block of a ritual, which can be defined as a complex series of actions in a (logical) functional relationship. Within a three-level sequence, cult (Cult/Worship : I, 2) must also be taken into cons…