Samuel Bochart

Samuel Bochart (French: [bɔʃaʁ]; 30 May 1599 – 16 May 1667) was a French biblical scholar and Reformed minister, a student of Thomas Erpenius and the teacher of Pierre Daniel Huet. His two-volume Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan (Caen 1646) exerted a profound influence on seventeenth-century Biblical exegesis.

Bochart was one of the several generations of antiquaries who expanded upon the basis Renaissance humanists had laid down, complementing their revolutionary hermeneutics by setting classical texts more firmly within the cultural contexts of Greek and Roman societies, without understanding of which they could never be fully understood. Thus Bochart stands at the beginning of a discipline of the history of ideas that provides the modern context for all textual studies.

Life

Bochart was born in Rouen, in Normandy. He studied philosophy at the Hugeunot Academy of Sedan and theology at the Academy of Saumur, before becoming a pastor of a Protestant church at Caen in 1628. He also studied at Oxford, where he was tutor to Wentworth Dillon, later Earl of Roscommon. His portrait still hangs in the lower reading room of the Bodleian Library.

Bochart's Hierozoicon sive bipartitum opus de animalibus sacrae scripturae (2 vols., London 1663), a zoological treatise on the animals of the Bible was more than a Christianized Pliny's Natural History nor just an expansion of Conrad Gesner's Historiae animalium. Bochart instanced the Arabic naturalists, like al-Damîrî and al-Qazwini, none of whose work had appeared in European print before.