Budde, Karl Ferdinand Reinhard°
BUDDE, KARL FERDINAND REINHARD°
BUDDE, KARL FERDINAND REINHARD ° (1850–1933), German Protestant Bible scholar and Hebraist. Budde was born at Bensburg near Cologne. He taught Bible at the universities of Bonn (1873–88), Strasbourg (1889–99), and Marburg (from 1900). With B. Duhm, B. Stade, R. Smend, and Emil Kautzsch, Budde was an ardent supporter of historical criticism as formulated by Eduard Reuss, Abraham Kuenen, Karl Heinrich Graf, and, above all others, Julius Wellhausen, his intimate friend. His detailed study Die biblische Urgeschichte (1883) is an attempt to recover the original sources of Genesis 1–11, to clarify their relation to each other, and to determine their origin. During the years 1888–89 Budde delivered a series of lectures at Harvard University on Religion of Israel to the Exile (1899), in which he championed the *Kenite hypothesis of the origins of yhwh worship. Throughout his life he was deeply interested in the history of Israel's literature and its literary characteristics. The former received expression in his work Geschichte der althebraeischen Litteratur (1906, 19092); the latter, in a series of articles on Hebrew metrics (in zaw 1882, 1883, 1892) and in his discussion of Hebrew poetry in J. Hastings (ed.), A Dictionary of the Bible (vol. 4, 1902). Among his greatest achievements was his treatment of the kinah, or lamentation meter.
With the advance of critical studies, the need arose for a new series of exegetical commentaries on the Bible, and Budde joined with many other scholars in the publication of the Goettinger Handkommentar zum Alten Testament. In addition to those mentioned above, the following are his most important works: Die Buecher Richter und Samuel, ihre Quellen und ihr Aufbau (1890); The Books of Samuel, Critical Edition of the Hebrew Text (1894); Das Buch Hiob (1896, 19132); Die sogenannten Ebed-Jahwe-Lieder und die Bedeutung des Knechtes Jahwes in Jesaja 40–55, Ein Minoritaetsvotum (1900); Der Kanon des Alten Testaments (1900); and Die Buecher Samuel (1902). Budde also translated into German a number of works of Abraham Kuenen, edited several editions of W.A. Hollenberg's Hebraeisches Schulbuch, and coedited Eduard Reuss: Briefwechsel mit seinem Schueler und Freunde Karl Heinrich Graf (1904).
bibliography:
T.H. Robinson, in: The Expository Times, 46 (1934–35), 298ff.; H.S. Cadbury, in: jbl, 55 (1936), iiff.; zaw, 12 (1935), 286–9.
[James Muilenburg]