HOBERG, GOTTFRIED. - German Catholic exegete, a leading figure at the time of modernism, b. at Heringhausen (Westphalia) on 19 Nov. 1857, d. at Freiburg im Breisgau on 19 Jan. 1924. A priest in 1881, he was professor at Paderborn in 1887, and professor at Freiburg im Breisgau from 1893 to 1919.
All of H.'s works are based on a solid philological formation; he insists on theological principles, and a strong personal tinge is observable in him. He was always extremely sensitive to the directives of ecclesiastical authority.
H. applied himself to the question of the Pentateuch in the times of Friedrich Delitzsch (v.) and treated it in the sense of tradition against criticism. "The Pentateuch," he explains, "results from the religious development of the people to whom the Revelation was entrusted, beginning from the times of Moses until after the Babylonian exile. The basis of this development is the laws of Moses, which form, in bulk and in importance, by far the greater part of the code of the ancient law." He excludes the "double" accounts from the Pentateuch, judging them incompatible with biblical inerrancy. He likewise holds it impossible, for theological reasons, that there was any influence of the code of Hammurabi. The change in the names of God results from the fact that in the times of the prophet Isaiah the name of Yahweh was inserted more or less into those passages in which God was spoken of as the author of supernatural Revelation. Certain events narrated in the first chapters of Genesis are to be understood as symbolic visions.
Works: Ibn Giunii de flexione (1885); De 1. Hieronymi ratione interpretandi (1886); Die Psalmen der Vulgata (1892, 2nd ed. 1906); Die Genesis (1899, 2nd ed. 1908); Die Fortschritte der biblischen Wissenschaft (1902); Die älteste lateinische Übersetzung des Buches Baruch (1902); Bibel und Babel (1904); Katechismus der biblischen Hermeneutik (1904, 2nd ed. 1922); Moses und der Pentateuch (1905); De Moyse Pentateuchi auctore (1906); Über die
Pentateuchfrage (1907); Bibel oder Babel? (1907); Liber Geneseos (1908); Katechismus der messianischen Weissagungen (1915); Die Einheitsschule (1917); he prepared the 5th ed. of F. Kaulen's Einleitung in die Hl. Schrift (1911 suppl.).