ZORELL, FRANZ. - Jesuit, biblical scholar, b. at Ravensburg (Württemberg) on 29 Sept. 1863, d. at Rome on 14 Dec. 1947.
Having done his gymnasium and lyceum studies at the Jesuit College in Feldkirch (Austria) and in his native city, and having studied Oriental languages for a year at the University of Tübingen, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1884. After his studies of philosophy and theology, done at Ditton Hall (England) and at Valkenburg (Holland), he devoted himself in 1897-98 to the study of Greek at the University of Berlin in order to prepare himself for the Lexicon Graecum Novi Testamenti, with whose publication he had been charged by the direction of the Cursus Scripturae Sacrae. Having finished this work (1st ed. 1911, 2nd ed. 1930), he set about the arduous task of the Lexicon Hebraicum et Aramaicum Veteris Testamenti. He saw the first six fascicles appear (1940 ff.), and at his death he left mollusks, as the object of malacology, founded however especially on conchology, that is to say on a single organ belonging to one part of mollusks, but this organ, if it does not allow the zoologist to deepen by itself the knowledge of mollusks, nevertheless has fundamental importance in paleontology.
The complexity of z., general and special, purely scientific and applied, the manuscript of all the rest, which, carefully revised and updated, is now in the course of publication. In 1928 he was called to the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Rome as professor of the Armenian and Georgian languages, which he taught until a few years before his death. The vast knowledge of ca. 20 ancient and modern languages and the acumen almost innate in him made Z. excellently prepared for these two lexicographical works, unique in the Catholic field.
Bibliography
Ernesto Vogt