DELITZSCH, FRIEDRICH. – Assyriologist, born in Erlangen on 3 September 1850, died in Berlin on 23 December 1922. There, after a brilliant teaching career at the University of Leipzig first and of Breslau thereafter, he held the chair of Assyriology for twenty years.
From his father Franz Julius he inherited a taste for Semitic languages, which he directed especially toward the study of the cuneiform texts recently discovered, becoming in this field an undisputed master, and thus advancing the decipherment of the Sumerian and Assyrian texts by giant strides. His Assyrisches Handwörterbuch (Leipzig 1896) remained a classic for a long time, together with his Assyrische Grammatik (Berlin 1899) and his Sumerisches Glossar (there, 1914). He also founded the Assyriologische Bibliothek (25 vols., Leipzig 1881–1920), a veritable mine of Assyriological texts, and Beiträge zur Assyriologie (10 vols., there, 1889–1914).
D.’s well-deserved fame was clouded when, trespassing into the exegetical field, he claimed to place the Bible beneath the Assyriological documents, stripping it of its inspiration. The lecture entitled Babel und Bibel (Leipzig 1902; Italian version Turin 1905), which he delivered in the presence of Wilhelm II on 13 January 1902 and repeated shortly afterward at the court on the same emperor’s orders, marked the beginning of a long controversy and of innumerable monographs on the relations between Babylonian-Assyrian and biblical literature. The wide resonance of D.’s lecture is shown by the fact that it had reached its 23rd thousand by 1921. The inglorious culmination of this pseudoscientific overreach was Die grosse Täuschung (2 vols., Stuttgart 1920–21) and Kritische Betrachtungen zum Alten Testament (there, 1921), in which, with the utmost frivolity and disbelief, D. describes the Old Testament as an enormous fraud.