MARTI, KARL°

MARTI, KARL° (1855–1925), Swiss-German Bible scholar. Marti studied at Basel in Switzerland with Emil Kautzsch, and with Franz Delitzsch at Leipzig in Germany. He taught at Basel university (1881–91) and was professor of theology (from 1895) and of Semitic philology (from 1901) in Bern(e) until his death. Marti wrote critical studies on Jeremiah (1889) and Zechariah (1892), and a concise grammar of biblical Aramaic   (1896; 19112). He edited the second edition of A. Kayser's Theologie des Alten Testaments (1894; 19075), bearing the title Geschichte der israelitischen Religion, a critical evaluation of biblical religion based on the Wellhausen-Graf reconstruction of Israel's history. Though a staunch Wellhausenian with regard to the biblical texts, Marti paid more attention to the ancient Near Eastern world in which they were produced. In the Kurzer Hand-Commentar zum Alten Testament, of which he was a co-editor, he wrote the volumes on Isaiah (1900), Daniel (1901), the Minor Prophets (1904), and the introductory volume, Die Religion des Alten Testaments unter den Religionen des vorderen Orients (1906; The Religion of the Old Testament, 1907). In the series Die Heilige Schrift des Alten Testaments he annotated Deuteronomy (1909), Daniel, and the books of Joel, Obadiah, Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi of the Minor Prophets (1910). Among his numerous articles on biblical studies and Judaica there is a strongly biased one on the nature of the Christian mission to the Jews ("Zur Judenmission," in: Kirchenblatt für die reformierte Schweiz, 1886). yehezkel kaufmann was a student of his. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: For a bibliography of K. Marti's writings until 1923, see: W. Baumgartner, in: BZAW, 41 (1925), 323–31. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. Begg, in: DBI, 2:132. (Zev Garber / S. David Sperling (2nd ed.)