BOCHART, SAMUEL. – French Protestant pastor and interpreter of the Bible’s natural history, born at Rouen on 30 May 1599, died 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 studied philosophy at Sédan, theology at Saumur, textual criticism at Oxford, and Semitic languages at Leiden under the celebrated Arabist Erpenius. Returning to France, he became pastor of Caen and remained there until his death. He spent a year in Stockholm (1652), having been summoned there by Christina of Sweden, accompanied by D. Huet (v.); there he studied thirteen Arabic manuscripts. His first important work, in two parts and 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 families; he explains the classical mythologies as alterations of the primitive tradition, but gives too much weight to phonetic similarities in glottology, seeing Phoenician everywhere.
B.’s masterpiece is Hierozoicon sive de animalibus Sanctae Scripturae (2 vols., folio, London 1675), which brings together an immense body of material from Greek, Latin, and rabbinic authors and, stripped of unnecessary digressions by E. J. C. Rosenmüller (1793–96), remains even today extremely useful.