GRESSMANN, HUGO

born March 21, 1877, Mlln, Ger. died April 6, 1927, Chicago, Ill., U.S. German Old Testament scholar who was a prominent advocate of the religio-historical approach. After attending the University of Gttingen, Gressmann was lecturer at the University of Kiel (190206), where he wrote his first important book, Der Ursprung der israelitisch-jdischen Eschatologie (1905; The Source of Israelite-Jewish Eschatology). In this book he applied to the Bible the comparative and phenomenological approaches used in the study of non-Christian religions. In both this and his posthumously published Der Messias (1929; The Messiah), he advanced the new theory that eschatology was not a late phenomenon in Israel but was pre-Exilic and that its popular form can be traced in many Old Testament passages. Gressmann became a professor at the University of Berlin in 1907. He wrote Die lteste Geschichtsschreibung und Prophetie Israels (1910; The Oldest Historiography and Prophecy of Israel) and Die Anfnge Israels (1914; The Beginning of Israel), both forming volumes of Hermann Gunkel's Schriften des Alten Testaments (Writings on the Old Testament). Gressmann's other major works are Moses und seine Zeit (1913; Moses and His Time) and Die Lade Jahves (1920; Yahweh's Ark of the Covenant).