Eli Smith
Eli Smith (born September 13, 1801, in Northford, Connecticut, to Eli and Polly (Whitney) Smith, and died January 11, 1857, in Beirut, Lebanon) was an American Protestant missionary and scholar. He graduated from Yale College in 1821 and from Andover Theological Seminary in 1826. He worked in Malta until 1829, then in company with H. G. O. Dwight traveled through Armenia and Georgia to Persia. They published their observations, Missionary Researches in Armenia, in 1833 in two volumes. Eli Smith settled in Beirut in 1833.
Along with Edward Robinson, he made two trips to the Holy Land in 1838 and 1852, acting as an interpreter for Robinson in his quest to identify and record biblical place names in Palestine, which was subsequently published in Robinson's Biblical Researches in Palestine.
He is known for bringing the first printing press with Arabic type to Syria.[1] He went on to pursue the task which he considered to be his life's work: translation of the Bible into Arabic. Although he died before completing the task, the work was completed by C. V. Van Dyck of the Syrian Mission and published in 1860 to 1865.
He married three times.
References
- ^ James B. Pritchard (1958). Archeology and the Old Testament. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 57–58.
Further reading
- A biographical article."
- Haim Goren, 'The loss of a minute is just so much loss of life': Edward Robinson and Eli Smith in the Holy Land, Brepols, 2020.
External links
- Passport for Explorer of Jerusalem, Rev. Eli Smith Archived 2015-01-11 at the Wayback Machine Shapell Manuscript Foundation
- "Eli Smith", In: Dictionary of American Biography (1943), Vol. 17, p. 257-258