Johannes Buxtorf the elder (1564–1629) was professor of Hebrew at Basel, and one of the leading Protestant scholars of the early seventeenth century. He was particularly interested in the history of the transmission of the text of the Bible among the Jews, and was concerned to establish the history of Jewish doctrine and ceremonial law. Buxtorf drew his information in part from Jewish informants, but he remained, in general, hostile to their religion, which he interpreted as being fixated on outward forms, and shaped by a hatred of Christianity. Nevertheless he was responsible for raising the standards of Hebrew knowledge and education among Protestants, in part through his grammatical and lexicographical publications, which tried to present Semitic languages in ways which would be familiar to contemporary students of Latin.
Buxtorf’s scholarly energies came to concentrate especially on the scriptural and exegetical traditions of the Jews around the time of Christ, and focussed on the Aramaic recensions and interpretations of the Bible which had been made then. He possessed a collection of important Aramaic manuscripts which were inherited by his son, also a Christian Hebraist, and later consulted by Walton (see catalogue no. 73 ) and others. Buxtorf used these in his most important work, the Basel edition of the rabbinic Bible. Both the elder and the younger Buxtorf were tireless defenders of the theory, advanced in Tiberias, that the vowel points of the Hebrew Bible were originally the work of Ezra and ‘the Great Synagogue’, and consequently that they were coeval with the language and composition of the inspired text of scripture.
Buxtorf traced a single tradition of text and language from the time of Ezra onwards, and argued that the post-Christian Masoretes had simply had an editor ial role in the construction of the vocalized Hebrew Bible. This was a view which came into increasing dispute in the middle of the century, involving the Buxtorfs in considerable controversy with those who argued that the vowel points were in fact additions to the text, reflecting the language and understanding of later readers of the Hebrew Bible, long after its first composition. The position adopted by the two Buxtorfs was consistent with the Protestant desire to interpret the original texts of the Bible as being the inspired word of God, preserved in its entirety by the protection of providence. Because of their doctrinal reliance on the literal sense of scripture, many Protestants were reluctant to concede that the text and its meaning might have changed over time.
This copy of Tiberias belonged to the English statesman and orientalist, John Selden (1584–1654), who wrote extensively about rabbinic law and Jewish customs, and was involved in promoting the idea of the London Polyglot in the early 1650s. The title-page bears Selden’s motto, ‘perˆ pant’s t¾n ™leuqer…an’ (‘[I value] liberty above all’). Selden bequeathed many of his manuscripts and oriental books to the Bodleian Library.