Otto Eissfeldt

Otto Eißfeldt, spelled alternatively Otto Eissfeldt, (September 1, 1887 in Northeim – April 23, 1973) was a German Protestant theologian, known for his work on the Old Testament and comparative near-east religious history. His magisterial 860-page The Old Testament: An Introduction (1934, 1965), giving a detailed literary-critical assessment of the history of the formation of each part of the Old Testament on the basis of the documentary hypothesis, has been called the "best of its kind".

Born in Northeim in Germany, Eissfeldt studied Protestant theology and Oriental languages from 1905 to 1912 at the University of Göttingen and Berlin's Humboldt University. He earned his habilitation in Berlin in 1913 with a thesis on Old Testament, and his PhD in Göttingen in 1916. From 1913 to 1922 he taught in Berlin, before being appointed in 1922 to the chair of Old Testament at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he remained professor for the rest of his life, also serving as a visiting professor at the University of Tübingen. He retired in 1957, and died at Halle in 1973.

Eissfeldt was one of the leading representatives of the literary-critical approach in Biblical criticism, following in the school of Julius Wellhausen and Rudolf Smend, with Hermann Gunkel and Wolf Wilhelm Friedrich von Baudissin his teachers in the area of religious history. A prolific writer, his Hexateuchsynopse (Hexateuch synopsis, 1922) and Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Introduction to the Old Testament, 1934, 1956, 1964, 1976) are outstanding examples of his literary-critical research achievements, while his numerous works on Phoenician religion (based in particular on the texts from Ugarit) were leading works in the field of near-east religious history.

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