GESENIUS, Friedrich HeinrichWTlhelm (1786— 1842), Orientalist and biblical critic, was born at Nordhausen, Hanover, on the 3d of February 1786. From the gymnasium of his native town he passed in 1803 as a student of philosophy and theology to the university of Helmstadt, where Henke was his most influential teacher; but the latter part of his undergraduate course was taken at Gottingen, where Eichhorn and T. C. Tychsen were then at the height of their popularity. In 1806, shortly after graduation, he became “repetent” and “privat-docent” in that university; and, as he was fond of afterwards relating, had Neander for his first pupil in Hebrew. In 1809, on the recommendation of Johann von Müller, he was appointed to a mastership in the gymnasium of Heiligenstadt, Westphalia, whence, in the following year, he was transferred to the university of Halle, where, from being professor extraordinarius in theology, lie was in a very short time promoted to an ordinary chair (1811). Many offers were subsequently made to him of high preferment elsewhere, but he clung to Halle for the remainder of his life, and taught with great regularity for upwards of thirty years, the only interruptions indeed being that of 1813-14, occasioned by the war of liberation, during which the university was closed, and those occasioned by two prolonged literary tours, first in 1820 to France and England in the society of his colleague Thilo for the examination of rare Oriental manuscripts, and afterwards in 1835 to England and Hollaud in connexion with his Phoenician studies. At a very early period he became the most popular teacher of Hebrew and of Old Testament introduction and exegesis in Germany; and during his later years the annual number of students attending his lectures on these and ...