Bochart, Samuel

BOCHART, SAMUEL. - French Protestant pastor, illustrator of the natural history of the Bible, b. at Rouen on 30 May 1599, d. at Caen on 16 May 1667.

Having received his first instruction from his father, pastor of Rouen, he went to complete his studies in Paris (1613), then to Sedan for philosophy, to Saumur for theology, to Oxford for textual criticism, and to Leiden for the Semitic languages under the celebrated Arabist Erpenius. Having returned to France, he became pastor of Caen and remained there until his death. He spent a year in Stockholm (1652), summoned there by Christina of Sweden, accompanied by D. Huet (v.), and there he studied 13 Arabic manuscripts. His first important work, in two parts, the fruit of twenty years of study, is Geographia sacra, I. Phaleg (seu de dispersione gentium et terrarum divisione facta in aedificatione turris Babel), II. Chanaan (seu de colonis et sermone Phoenicum), Caen 1646, 1651 and 1653; Frankfurt 1674 and 1681). He understands the genealogies of Genesis as tables of peoples, not of families, and explains the classical mythologies as alterations of the primitive tradition, but he indulges too much in phonetic similarities in glottology, seeing Phoenician everywhere.

B.'s masterpiece is the Hierozoicon sive de animalibus Sanctae Scripturae (2 vols., in-fol., London 1675), which gathers an immense body of material from Greek, Latin and rabbinic authors, and, pruned of useless digressions by E. J. C. Rosenmüller (1793-96), is still extremely useful today.