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William Henry Green Edit Profile

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William Henry Green was an American scholar of the Hebrew language. He was also a chairman of the Old Testament committee of the Anglo-American Bible revision committee.

Background

Green was born in Groveville, near Bordentown, New Jersey on the 27th of January 1824. He was descended in the sixth generation from Jonathan Dickinson, first president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and his ancestors had been closely connected with the Presbyterian church.

Education

Green graduated in 1840 from Lafayette College. In 1846 he graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary.

Career

William Henry Green was a tutor in mathematics (1840-1842) and adjunct professor (1843-1844) in Lafayette College. He was an instructor in Hebrew in Princeton Theological Seminary in 1846-1849.

He was ordained in 1848 and was pastor of the Central Presbyterian church of Philadelphia in 1849-1851. From August 1851 until his death, in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1900, he was professor of Biblical and Oriental Literature in Princeton Theological Seminary. From 1859 the title of his chair was Oriental and Old Testament Literature. In 1868 he refused the presidency of Princeton College; as senior professor he was long acting head of the Theological Seminary.

All his knowledge of Semitic languages he used in a “conservative Higher Criticism, ” which is maintained in the following works: The Pentateuch Vindicated from the Aspersions of Bishop Colenso (1863), Moses and the Prophets (1883), The Hebrew Feasts in their Relation to Recent Critical Hypotheses Concerning the Pentateuch (1885), The Unity of the Book of Genesis (ISQ 5), The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch (1895), and A General Introduction to the Old Testament, vol. i. Canon (1898), vol. ii. Text (1899).

Achievements

  • Green was a great Hebrew teacher: his "Grammar of the Hebrew Language" (1861, revised 1888) was a distinct improvement in method on Gesenius, Roediger, Ewald and Nordheimer. In 1890 he published a highly influential article in Bibliotheca Sacra entitled "Primeval Chronology" in which he strongly criticized Irish Archbishop James Ussher's popular chronology of the world back to Creation and its association with the King James Bible.

    He was known as the scholarly leader of the orthodox wing of the Presbyterian church in America, and as the moderator of the General Assembly of 1891.

Works

All works

Connections

Father:
Jonathan Dickinson