An Historic University House

In the photos below, I am standing at the house where Julius Wellhausen had an encounter that would markedly influence his monumental research on the Hebrew Bible. Wellhausen reported that here during a casual visit to Göttingen in the summer of 1867 he learned from Albrecht Ritschl that Karl Heinrich Graf dated the Bible’s books of Law later in time than the Prophets, overturning all traditional assumptions. Wellhausen later wrote, “Almost without knowing his reasons for the hypothesis, I was prepared to accept it; I readily acknowledged to myself the possibility of understanding Hebrew antiquity without the book of the Torah.”