Paul E. Kahle

Paul Ernst Kahle ( born January 21, 1875 in Hohenstein, † September 24, 1964 in Bonn ) was a German Protestant theologian and orientalist.

Biography

Born in East Prussia, he studied from 1894 in Marburg and Halle ( Saale) Oriental Studies and Theology. He was phil in Halle in 1898 to Dr.. doctorate and put 1902 in Wittenberg his second theological state exam. In the same year he received his doctorate, also in Hall, Dr. theol.

He joined the church service and went as parish priest until after Brăila in Romania and then to Cairo, where he remained until 1908. In 1909 he habilitated in Hall of Semitic philology and was appointed full professor in 1918 after casting. In 1923 he was appointed professor at the University of Bonn, where he developed the Oriental Seminary and a Chinese and a Japanese department expanded.

After his wife Marie Kahle and his son had helped Jewish businessmen after Kristallnacht, clean up their business, the pressure from the Nazis grew stronger. Paul Kahle received a ban from the university and was suspended. In 1939 he was forced to emigrate to England with his family. After the war he returned to Bonn and worked as a professor emeritus. In 1963 he moved to Dusseldorf and died in Bonn after an accident on the stroke.

The scientific work

Kahle had already dealt in his two Halle Promotion writings on the topic, with him his entire life and until today should make particularly his reputation as a scientist that: The history of the Hebrew language and the Hebrew Bible text and its ancient translations.

In philosophical dissertation on the Samaritan Pentateuchtargum he deals with the single still living form of Hebrew, which is not influenced by the vocalization of the Masoretes of Tiberias.

In the theological doctoral thesis he examined the handwriting Ms qu or 680 from the Berlin State Library. This manuscript includes large parts of the Old Testament " scriptures" ( Ketubim ); they came from Yemen to Berlin and contains superficially vocalization ( punctuation ), which is influenced by tiberiensischen system. But Kahle was able to prove that the manuscript still reveals traces of a more original punctuation, which dates back to Babylonia and differs in several respects from tiberiensischen system. Later he was able to identify even more manuscripts with the Babylonian punctuation, which are discussed in the " Journal of the Old Testament scholarship " from 1928 and represented partly in photography. In addition to the Babylonian system of punctuation Kahle also described an older palästinisches system that is not a direct precursor of tiberiensischen system.

From the study of the older non - tiberiensischen Punktationssystemen and with the transcriptions in the Septuagint or the Hexapla of Origen results for Kahle that the Hebrew Masoretes of Tiberias, which is the basis of the later generally accepted Hebrew text, not living vernacular was but more design contains as before, until today, accepted in part. The Hebrew, as it exists in today's editions of the Bible, and how it served as the basis of modern Ivrit, so is a ( re-) constructed educational and liturgical language, which owes its existence to the need to present a reasonably correct pronunciation of Hebrew as precisely as possible. Inspired and encouraged the work of the Masoretes of Tiberias to Kahle was mainly due to the determination of the Koran debate, which is partly also design, as well as by the advent of Karäerbewegung.

In view of the Septuagint Kahle took the view that there was no generally accepted Urübersetzung, but a kind of Greek Targum, which assumed different form in the worship of various communities. The subsequent unification he accordingly leads back to the secondary need for a standard text. He disagreed with the basic thesis of the Göttingen Septuagint company whose representatives have again contradicted him.

Kahle was one of the editors of Biblia Hebraica by Rudolf Kittel, also called Kittel Bible, together with Albrecht Alt and Otto Eißfeldt.

Honors

Comments

Works

• Critical text and lexical comments on Samaritan Pentateuchtargum, [ Diss phil. ] Hall, 1898.
• The Masoretic Text of the Old Testament according to the tradition of the Babylonian Jews, [ Diss theol. ] Halle 1902.
• Masoretes of the East. The dotted oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament and the Targums, BWAT 15, Leipzig 1913.
• Masoretes of the West I, BWAT NF 8 Leipzig 1927: II, BWANT 3/14, Leipzig 1930
• The Hebrew Bible text ever since Franz Delitzsch, 1961.
• The Cairo Geniza, research into the history of the Hebrew Bible text and its translations, ed. by R. Meyer, Berlin 1962, English version (PDF, 19.3 MB).