GREEN, WILLIAM HENRY (1825-1900), American Hebrew scholar, was born in
Groveville, near Bordentown, New Jersey, on the 27th of January 1825. 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.
He graduated in 1840 from Lafayette College, where he was tutor in
mathematics (1840-1842) and adjunct professor (1843-1844). In 1846 he
graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, and was instructor in
Hebrew there 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, on the 10th of February
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. He 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. 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_
(1895), _The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch_ (1895), and _A General
Introduction to the Old Testament_, vol. i. Canon (1898), vol. ii.
_Text_ (1899). He was the scholarly leader of the orthodox wing of the
Presbyterian church in America, and was moderator of the General
Assembly of 1891. Green was chairman of the Old Testament committee of
the Anglo-American Bible revision committee.
See the articles by John D. Davis in _The Biblical World_, new series,
vol. xv., pp. 406-413 (Chicago, 1900), and _The Presbyterian and
Reformed Review_, vol. xi. pp. 377-396 (Philadelphia, 1900).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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