BAUDISSIN, WOLF WILHELM, GRAF VON°

BAUDISSIN, WOLF WILHELM, GRAF VON° (1847–1926), German Bible critic and historian of religion. Baudissin was born in Holstein and taught at the universities of Leipzig, 1874–1876; Strasbourg, 1876–1881; Marburg, 1881–1900; and Berlin, 1900–1921. He belonged to the Wellhausen school of thought in regard to the understanding of the Pentateuch as a whole, but he departed from its philosophy in his Die Geschichte des alttestamentlichen Priesterthums (1889) where he argued for the priority of P, the pre-Exilic Priestly Source, over the D, Deuteronomic, Source. In Kyrios als Gottesname im Judentum und seine Stelle in der Religionsgeschichte (4 vols., 1929), published posthumously, Baudissin championed the theory that the substitution of Adonai for YHWH first originated among Greek-speaking Jews. His main contributions in the area of comparative religion are Studien zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte (2 vols., 1876–78); Jahve et Moloch (1874); and Adonis und Esmun (1911). These studies deal with the influence of the Canaanite cult on the history of Israel. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: ZAWB, 33 (1918) (= Festschrift … Baudissin) includes bibliography; O. Eissfeldt, Kleine Schriften, 1 (1962), 115–42, 234–8. (Zev Garber)