extinct today. In addition to his text-critical and philological works, he also wrote commentaries on the gospels and was one of the pioneers in pre-Islamic Arabic studies. But his principal achievement was to synthesize and refine the work of predecessors, from de Wette to Graf, in a historical sketch of the religious history of Israel which, in a certain sense, has dictated the agenda of Old Testament studies to the present day. While Wellhausen had very definite and very critical ideas about religious