Condamin, Albert

CONDAMIN, ALBERT. - Jesuit exegete and orientalist, b. in Marseille on 7 Sept. 1862, d. on 3 July 1940. He devoted himself mainly to the study of two problems: the relations between Babylon and the Bible, and the metrical and strophic composition of the biblical poems.

On the first subject he composed the Bulletin des religions babylonienne et assyrienne, begun in Etudes in 1909 and continued from 1910 to 1931 in Recherches de science religieuses, La religione di Babilonia e d'Assiria, in C. Martindale's Storia delle religioni (Italian trans., Florence 1913); Babylone et la Bible, in DFC, I, cols. 327-390. On the second problem he published various articles in Revue biblique, of which he was an assiduous contributor from 1897 to 1910, analyzing passages from the prophetic books. In the collection Etudes bibliques (Paris) directed by Fr. Lagrange (v.), he published with translation and commentary Le livre d'Isaïe (1905), Le livre de Jérémie (1920, 3rd ed. 1936), Poèmes de la Bible, avec introduction sur la strophique hébraïque (1933). Noteworthy, among his other writings, are Jonas, Judith, Prophétisme israélite, in DFC, the Chronique biblique (of the Old Testament) which he published for 40 years in the Revue (pratique d') Apologétique; and two apologetic studies (Voltaire, «le Grand Homme» d'A. Bayet, Paris 1936; A la recherche d'une morale laïque: Les découvertes de M. Bayet, ibid. 1937).

Francesco Spadafora