Samuel Bochart

Samuel Bochart
Samuel Bochart
	17th century portrait of Bochart
Born	10 May 1599; Rouen, Normandy, France
Died	16 May 1667 (aged 68); Caen, Calvados, France
Nationality	French
Occupation	Reverend
Known for	French Protestant biblical scholar

Samuel Bochart (30 May 1599 – 16 May 1667) was a French Protestant biblical scholar, a student of Thomas Erpenius and the teacher of Pierre Daniel Huet. His two-volume Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan (Caen 1646) exerted a profound influence on seventeenth-century Biblical exegesis.

Bochart was one of the several generations of

history of ideas

that provides the modern context for all textual studies.

Life

Bochart was born in

Protestant church at Caen, and also studied in Oxford, where he was tutor to Wentworth Dillon, later Earl of Roscommon

.

Bochart's Hierozoicon sive bipartitum opus de animalibus sacrae scripturae (2 vols., London 1663), a

Classical Antiquity and passed to medieval culture through Isidore of Seville

.

In 1652

Bishop of Avranches

. On his return to Caen he was received into the academy of that city.

Bochart was a man of profound erudition; he possessed a thorough knowledge of the principal

Ethiopic. Bochart's examples and quotations provided challenges to London typographers, who created typefaces to reproduce them. He was so absorbed in his favorite study, that he saw Phoenician origins even in Celtic words,^[3] and hence the number of chimerical etymologies

which swarm in his works.

His correspondence on theological subjects, carried on with

Salmasius and Vossius

was included in his posthumous collected works, and so achieved a wide distribution.

He died of apoplexy, aged 67, in the academy of Caen during an impassioned debate with Huet on the translation of a passage of Origen related to transubstantiation.

His major works

a dictionary of Arabic
Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan (Caen 1646)
De consiliandis in religionis negotio protestantibus, 1662
Hierozoïcon, (London 1663)

Notes

^ Peter N. Miller, "The "Antiquarianization" of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–57)" Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3, (July 2001).
^ "Life of Animals". World Digital Library. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
^ "Absurd curiosity (for we must call things by their right names) has been carried so far as to seek Hebrew and Chaldee derivations from certain Teutonic and Celtic words. This, Bochart never fails to do. It is astonishing with what confidence these men of genius have proved that expressions used on the banks of the Tiber were borrowed from the patois of the savages of Biscay." Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764: "Augury" (on-line Archived 9 September 2006 at the Wayback Machine)

References

Miller, Peter N. "The "Antiquarianization" of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–57)" Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3(July 2001), pp. 463–482.
Shalev, Zur. Sacred Words and Worlds: Geography, Religion, and Scholarship, 1550–1700, Leiden: Brill, 2012.
ISBN 2-914266-04-9

(Smitskamp, 2003) Samuel Bochart, Opera omnia Bibliographic description.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bochart, Samuel". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

External links

"Bochart, Samuel" . The Nuttall Encyclopædia. 1907.
Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). "Bochart, Samuel". The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
Works by Samuel Bochart at Post-Reformation Digital Library
Samuelis Bocharti Hierozoicon: sive De animalibus S. Scripturae, Volume 2 1794 Latin, at Google books

[1] Peter N. Miller, "The "Antiquarianization" of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–57)" Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3, (July 2001).

[WDL1-2] "Life of Animals". World Digital Library. Retrieved 27 February 2013.

[3] "Absurd curiosity (for we must call things by their right names) has been carried so far as to seek Hebrew and Chaldee derivations from certain Teutonic and Celtic words. This, Bochart never fails to do. It is astonishing with what confidence these men of genius have proved that expressions used on the banks of the Tiber were borrowed from the patois of the savages of Biscay." Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764: "Augury" (on-line Archived 9 September 2006 at the Wayback Machine)

[3]

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