DELITZSCH, FRIEDRICH. - Assyriologist, b. at Erlangen on 3 Sept. 1850, d. on 23 Dec. 1922 in Berlin. There, as the crowning of a brilliant career as a teacher first at the University of Leipzig and later at Breslau, he held the chair of Assyriology for twenty years.
From his father Franz Julius he inherited a taste for the Semitic languages, which he directed especially to the study of the recently discovered cuneiform texts, becoming an undisputed master in that field, so as to bring about gigantic strides in the decipherment of Sumerian and Assyrian texts. His Assyrisches Handwörterbuch (Leipzig 1896) remained for a long time a classic together with his Assyrische Grammatik (Berlin 1899) and his Sumerisches Glossar (ibid. 1914). He also founded the Assyriologische Bibliothek (25 vols., Leipzig 1881-1920), a veritable mine of Assyriological texts, and Beiträge zur Assyriologie (10 vols., ibid. 1889-1914).
D.'s well-deserved fame was tarnished when, invading the field of exegesis, he sought to place the Bible below the Assyriological documents, dethroning it from its inspiration. The lecture entitled Babel und Bibel (Leipzig 1902; Italian trans. Turin 1905), which he delivered in the presence of William II on 13 Jan. 1902 and repeated shortly afterward at court by order of the same emperor, marked the beginning of a long controversy and of countless monographs on the relations between Babylonian-Assyrian and biblical literature. The vast resonance of D.'s lecture is shown by the fact that by 1921 it had reached its 23rd thousand. The inglorious culmination of this pseudoscientific overstepping were Die grosse Täuschung (2 vols., Stuttgart 1920-21) and Kritische Betrachtungen zum Alten Testament (ibid. 1921), in which, with extreme levity and incredulity, D. characterizes the Old Testament as an enormous fraud.