BENEDETTI (in Arabic Mubarak, altered by Westerners to Ambarak), PIETRO. — Maronite Orientalist, born in 1663 at Baḥā (Lebanon), not at Ġuṣṭā (al-Mašriq, 21 [1923], p. 274), died in Rome in 1742. He studied at the Maronite College in Rome (1672–85) and returned to Lebanon, where (1685) the learned patriarch ad-Duvajhi (in Latin Aldoensis and more often Edenensis) ordained him a priest and entrusted him with revising his writings. In 1691 he sent him to Rome on a mission. Two years later, while returning to Lebanon, he was detained in Florence by Cosimo III, who commissioned him to reorganize the printing press of Lorenzo il Magnifico and to print the manuscripts of the Palatine and Laurentian libraries. Around 1700 he was appointed professor of biblical sciences at the University of Pisa. In 1707 he entered the Society of Jesus; in 1709 Clement XI appointed him a member of the commission charged with the edition of the Septuagint.
He founded the college of 'Ajnūrā in Lebanon, which is mentioned by the Lebanese Synods IV, VI, 6, VIII. He translated s. Efrem from Syriac, thereby being the first to open to the West a mine of sacred knowledge, but died while translating the second half of vol. III (last), which was continued and published by S. E. Assemāni (Rome 1743). Appended to vol. II he published Antirheticon seu confutatio Io. Kohlii ad Geminōs S. Ephraemi de S. Coena Sermones (Rome 1740) and Antirheticon de Aug. Eucharistiae Sacramento adversus R. P. Le Brumun et E. Renaudotium (there 1740). He translated from Arabic the Kitāb al-Iḫtiǧāq of the patriarch ad-Duvajhi under the title Vindicis Maronitarum, which remained unpublished in ms. Vat. lat. 7411. Other writings of his are listed in Sommervogel, I (cols. 1295–98).
BIBLI. In addition to the works cited in Mémoires de Trévoux, 1728, p. 171; and 1745, pp. 1264–95; and in Journal des Savants, January 1745, pp. 99–103; A. Fabroni, Vitamum Italorum... qui sacc. XVIII flamenut decades, decas IV, Pisa 1774, pp. 300–307; id., in Hist. Academiae Pisanac, III, there 1795, pp. 152–59; L. G. Michaud, Biografia universale antica e moderna, Italian translation, V. Venice 1822, p. 299 ff. Pietro Sfair