Protestant Old Testament scholar, who also wrote on the phenomenology of religion.

After serving as pastor of the German-Dutch church at Leghorn (Livorno) for 18 months, he took his doctorate in Basel (1895) and taught there (1896–1912) and later in Tübingen (1913), Göttingen (1914), and Berlin (1928–39). In biblical criticism he moved progressively toward the school of comparative religion.

His Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen (1906; “Apocrypha and Pseudepigraphia”) was an important contribution to Jewish literary history, and the second volume of Biblische Theologie (1911; “Biblical Theology”), conceived as a history of Old Testament religion, broke new ground. His works on the history of religion, such as Dynamismus und Personalismus in der Seelenauffassung (1930; “Dynamism and Personalism in the Knowledge of the Soul”), Götterspaltung und Göttervereinigung (1933; “The Division and the Unification of Gods”), and Das Geschlecht der Gottheit (1934; “Sex in Godhood”), also are marked by immense care in the collection of material and by the skill with which problems are laid bare and solutions to them offered.