A Voyage Round My Library

_full_journalsubtitle: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches _full_abbrevjournaltitle: BI _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 0927-2569 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5152 (online version) _full_issue: 4-5 _full_issuetitle: The Futures of Biblical Studies _full_alt_author_running_head (change var. to _alt_author_rh): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (change var. to _alt_arttitle_rh): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_toc: 0 _full_is_advance_article: 0 440 Biblical Interpretation 25 (2017) 440-477 Clines brill.com/bi A Voyage round My Library David J.A. Clines University of Sheffield, UK [email protected] The conference on the Futures of Biblical Studies at the University of Kent in Canterbury, 1-2 June, 2016 was planned as, among other things, a celebration of the donation of (the first half of) my personal library to the University Library earlier in the year. For my contribution to the event, I had the idea of choosing some interesting or unusual books from my collection (the other half, that is, which will eventually make their way to Kent) and talking about them. 1 R. Payne Smith (?1818-95) (ed.), Thesaurus syriacus, collegerunt Stephanus M. Quatremere, Georgius Henricus Bernstein [et al.] ... Auxit, digessit, exposuit, edidit R. Payne Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1901). This is almost the largest book I own.1 It was published as ten fascicules making four volumes, but in my edition it is bound as two huge folio volumes, 2308 pages, 15 ins. × 12.2 I visit it first in this voyage because of its local connection with Canterbury. Opposite are two portraits of the man.3 1 The largest is the work of Edmund Castell (1606-1685), Lexicon heptaglotton, hebraicum , chal- daicum, syriacum, samaritanum, ethiopicum, arabicum, conjunctim; et persicum, separatim (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1669): 18 × 11.5 ins. 2 I have not seen the modern reprint by Gorgias Press, Piscataway, NJ (2007); at 10.75 × 8.25 ins. the page size must be much reduced, though the volumes would be more manageable. 3 The left-hand portrait is from The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library, titled ‘Rev. Dr. Robert Payne Smith, dean of Canterbury’. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessible at <http:// digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b9b8db5c-25b8-0160-e040-e00a18064d4a>. The right-hand © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/15685152-02545P02Biblical Interpretation 25 (2017) 440-477 _full_journalsubtitle: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches _full_abbrevjournaltitle: BI _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 0927-2569 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5152 (online version) _full_issue: 4-5 _full_issuetitle: The Futures of Biblical Studies _full_alt_author_running_head (change var. to _alt_author_rh): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (change var. to _alt_arttitle_rh): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_toc: 0 _full_is_advance_article: 0 A Voyage Round My Library 441 Figure 1 Robert Payne Smith (? 1818-95). Born in 1818 (?1819),4 Payne Smith was taught Hebrew at home by his eldest sister, Esther,5 read classics at Pembroke College, Oxford, was ordained, be- came Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford (1865), and served on the Old Tes- tament revision committee for the Revised Version of the Bible (published 1881). In 1871, however, after just six years in his Oxford chair, he was appointed Dean of Canterbury by the Prime Minister, Gladstone, and spent the next 24 years occupied in good works in Canterbury but principally engaged on his lexicon, begun in 1868. Says his biographer, ‘He had lived to publish nine fas- cicles of his great Syriac dictionary; the final one was seen through the press (1901) by his second daughter, Jessie, and her husband David Samuel Margo- liouth’. He left an estate of £16,783 11s. 5d. (£2m in today’s money), a creditable portrait is by Samuel Alexander Walker, albumen print, published 1874, National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG Ax29259. 4 The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives 1818, the Archives of the Bodleian Library, Oxford 1819. 5 What of her? There is an Esther Payne Smith School in Northdale, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, but since it was founded only in the twentieth century it cannot hardly be her name it carries (perhaps a relative?). Intriguing to consider how a young woman in the 1830s came by a knowledge of Hebrew, though. Biblical Interpretation 25 (2017) 440-477.

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