Background
Gibbs was born on April 30, 1790 in Salem, Massachusetts, the fourth son of Sir Henry Gibbs of Honington, Warwickshire, who came to Boston about 1685.
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Gibbs was born on April 30, 1790 in Salem, Massachusetts, the fourth son of Sir Henry Gibbs of Honington, Warwickshire, who came to Boston about 1685.
His father and grandfather, each named Henry Gibbs, were graduates of Harvard College, but it was fated that Josiah should go to Yale. His father had died in 1794; and as his mother, Mercy (Prescott) Gibbs, had several near relatives living in New Haven, he was sent there to college, and graduated in the class of 1809. While in college he showed unusual ability as a scholar, and in 1811 he was called from Salem to a tutorship at Yale, which he held for four years. Going then to Andover, he studied Hebrew and other Oriental languages with Moses Stuart, in whose family he resided for a time. He also continued the theological studies begun in New Haven, where he had been licensed (in 1814) to preach, though he rarely made use of this privilege.
Gibbs was able to give some help in the preparation of Moses Stuart's most important work, the Hebrew Grammar, which appeared in 1821. This was mainly a translation of the German textbook of Wilhelm Gesenius, the true founder of modern Hebrew grammar and lexicography. Gibbs now undertook to translate Gesenius's Hebräisches und Chaldäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament (ed. of 1815), for there was as great need of a Hebrew dictionary as there had been of a grammar. The resulting work, entitled Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament including the Biblical Chaldee, was published at Andover in 1824. It was an admirable achievement, and remained the standard lexicon in this country until it was superseded in 1836 by Robinson's work. It was reprinted in London in 1827. He published an abridgment in 1828, which received a second edition four years later. In the fall of 1824 Gibbs accepted an appointment at Yale College as lecturer in Biblical literature and college librarian. Two years later he was promoted to the rank of professor of sacred literature in the recently established Divinity School. Gibbs next set himself to translate Gesenius's more elaborate Lexicon Manuale Hebraicum et Chaldaicum, which appeared in Germany in 1833. Working in his minutely painstaking way, rearranging the material to some extent, verifying and correcting the references, and occasionally adding his own comments and illustrations, he had printed 432 pages, about one-third of the whole, when his undertaking was brought to an untimely end by the publication, in 1836, of Edward Robinson's less elaborate but excellent translation of the same lexicon. This was a staggering blow, from which Gibbs never fully recovered. The printed sheets, the fruit of so great labor and expense, were destroyed, only a few sets being preserved. These give clear testimony to their author's intimate acquaintance with Hebrew and the cognate languages, and to his extraordinary accuracy and painstaking. From this time on, he devoted himself to the study of comparative philology, following generally in the footsteps of German scholars. Three small volumes of his studies were published in New Haven during the years 1857-1860. Excessively modest and retiring, he was generally in the background when he might well have been prominent. As one of the first members of the American Oriental Society (founded in 1842) he contributed to each of the first five volumes of its Journal. He also published many brief articles in the American Journal of Science and Arts, the Bibliotheca Sacra, the New Englander, and other journals. Gibbs died in his seventy-first year in New Haven, Connecticut.
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Member of the American Antiquarian Society (1826)
Gibbs married, on September 30, 1830, Mary Anna Van Cleve, of Princeton, New Jersey. They had five children.