Johann Gottfried Eichhorn

Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (16 October 1752, in Dörrenzimmern – 27 June 1827, in Göttingen) was a German Protestant theologian of the Enlightenment and an early orientalist.

Born at Dörrenzimmern (now part of the city of Ingelfingen), in the Principality of Hohenlohe-Oehringen, Eichhorn was educated at the state school in Weikersheim, where his father was superintendent, at the gymnasium at Heilbronn and at the University of Göttingen (1770–1774), studying under Johann David Michaelis.

[1] His published habilitation lecture was about "monetary matters of the early Arabs (De rei numariae apud Arabas initiis)" on the basis of the chronicle of Makin ibn al-'Amid.

"My greatest trouble," he says in the preface to the second edition of his Einleitung, "I had to bestow on a hitherto unworked field--on the investigation of the inner nature of the Old Testament with the help of the Higher Criticism (not a new name to any humanist)."

He did not perceive in the biblical books any religious ideas of much importance for modern times; they interested him merely historically and for the light they cast upon antiquity.