ARNOLD BOGUMIL EHRLICH

Background

Arnold Bogumil Ehrlich was born in Wlodawa, Polish Russia, the posthumous and only child of Mordecai and Zelda Biederman Ehrlich. He emerged from the playless childhood of the scholastic Ghetto to marry at the age of fourteen.

Education

While still being a Talmud student, he crossed the border into Germany, and there he laid the foundations of his secular learning.

Later he secured an instructorship in the Emanu-El Preparatory School for the Hebrew Union College.

Career

He settled in Leipzig, where for several years he worked with Germany’s most gifted Christian Biblical scholar, Franz Delitzsch.

After a short stay in England, Ehrlich came to America in 1878, armed with a literary knowledge of a large number of languages, an expert knowledge of classical Arabic, and a unique knowledge of the Hebrew Bible.

Here all doors were closed to his learning.

Christian institutions had no place for this Polish Jew, while Jews suspected his long contact with Delitzsch, the head of the missionary Institutum Judaicum in Leipzig.

The first work he obtained in New York was that of rolling barrels.

Achievements

• The masterly touch of Ehrlich’s unrivaled instinct for Hebrew usage has been traced in Delitzsch’s classical Hebrew translation of the New Testament. Ehrlich received scant notice during his life, despite the fact that he had a veritable genius for Biblical interpretation. In the three volumes of his Mikra ki-Pheschuto (Berlin, 1899 - 1901) ; in his edition of Die Psalmen (Berlin, 1905) ; and in the seven volumes of his Randglossen zur hebräischen Bibel (Leipzig, 1908 - 14). These volumes are the most comprehensive and valuable contribution to Old Testament scholarship made in America.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Die Psalmen (German Edition)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • MikraÌ‚ ki-PheshutoÌ‚: The Bible according to its literal meaning; in 3 volumes, (The Library of Biblical studies)

Religion

Judaism

Views

Ehrlich regarded Biblical higher criticism as premature and unreliable because based on an insufficiently understood text.

With extraordinary tenacity and single-mindedness he set himself to establish what he believed to be the true reading and true meaning of the text.

To this life task, he brought intuitive verbal and literary keenness.

He would say of himself, “I am like a tea taster.

I put the word on my tongue, and I know whether it is good or bad. ”

Ehrlich’s contributions to Biblical exegesis and Hebrew lexicography and grammar are replete with illuminating suggestion, but his excessive quest of originality, the audacity of many of his later suggestions, his contempt for the mistakes of others, and the current preoccupation with the higher rather than the lower criticism of the Bible, have militated against a due recognition of his work.

In scholarship as in life he fell between two stools.

His treatment of the Biblical text was regarded by many Christian scholars as too Jewish, and by many Jewish scholars as too little Jewish.

However, productive Old Testament study of the future must follow Ehrlich in combining the linguistic methods of Christian commentators with Jewish mastery of the Hebrew text and its collateral Hebrew literature.

Quotations: He would say of himself, “I am like a tea taster. I put the word on my tongue, and I know whether it is good or bad. ”

Personality

He concentrated a wealth of masterly exegesis, marked by brilliant, if erratic, originality.

Connections

Father:

Mordecai Ehrlich

Mother:

Zelda Biederman Ehrlich

Second wife:

Pauline Offner

colleague:

Franz Delitzsch