Koenig, Friedrich Edward

Born in the Saxon textile city of Reichenbach . While studying at a secondary school in a real school and gymnasium in the city of Plauena, he showed extraordinary achievements, in connection with which he was given the opportunity to visit freely. He was even allowed to skip class, and in 1867 he passed the final exam with honors.

At the University of Leipzig, he first studied history and classical philology , and then moved on to theology and oriental studies . At the same time, he also attended all kinds of courses that could be useful in the broadest sense for Bible scholars: the history of writing, comparative linguistics and physiology of sound, psychophysics , Arabic studies , indology , German studies , geography of Palestine, and even mineralogy .

After Edward received a thesis degree in theology in 1871, he began to teach religion at the Royal Saxon Real Gymnasium. A year later, he defended his thesis for a doctorate in philology on the topic “ Thought, sound and emphasis as three factors in the formation of language, comparative analysis and physiology using the example of Hebrew ” in the field of Semitic linguistics . In the same year he married Alvina Löffler, who gave him four daughters. In 1876, he was a teacher in Leipzig Tomskul , in addition to studying Old Ethiopian and related South Semitic languages, and then published his second linguistic work, “ New Studies on the Writing, Pronunciation and General Morphology of the Ethiopian Language, Comparative and Physiological Explanations from Source Materials ”. ^[3]

For his doctoral dissertation “ De criticae sacrae argumenti e linguae legibus repetitio historia, natura, vi ” (“ Criticism of the language of scripture, its history, nature and authority ”) ^[4] in 1879 he received the qualification Venia legendi as a private assistant professor at the Faculty of Theology in Leipzig, where he became an associate professor in 1885. Three years later, at the age of 42, at the University of Erlangen, he receives a doctorate in theology (“D”) and becomes a teacher at the theological faculty of the University of Rostock . In 1900, he was a professor of Old Testament exegetics at the University of Bonn and until his retirement in 1926 was the director of the Old Testament seminary. In 1914, Royal Netherlands University of Groningen awarded König a second honorary doctorate in Doctor litterarum Semitticarum .

As a linguist, Koenig tries to apply the phonetic and physiological methods of modern philology to Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Ethiopian, in such works as “ Thought, sound, and emphasis as three factors of language formation ” (1874), to a new approach to the study of writing , phonetics and morphology of the Ethiopian language (1877), as well as a three-dimensional historical and critical approach to the study of Hebrew (1881–1897). And also, Koenig was extremely productive as an interpreter of the Old Testament biblical texts, as evidenced by the long list of his publications.

Koenig took a very peculiar position, which changed over time from anti-Semitism to pan-Babylonism , which at the beginning of the 20th century aroused wide circles of the public ^[5] with Oswald Spengler's “ Sunset of Europe ”, blasphemous processes ^[6] and National Socialism .

Koenig himself, retrospectively evaluating his work in the field of linguistics and religion ^[7] , divided his works into three groups:

1. Publications on literary criticism and exegetics using the language of evidence.
2. Works on the discussion of the concept of religious beliefs.
3. Works against the Babylonization of the Old Testament and anti-Judaism.

Often he was rejected, sometimes ahead of his time, and in many cases was already outdated. His many biblical and exegetical works received little appreciation. However, from a linguistic point of view, his work is gaining more and more recognition. .

• Koenig, Friedrich-Eduard // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.