Edward Robinson

Edward Robinson (1794-1863) was a prominent biblical scholar and prolific author. A graduate of Hamilton College in 1816, he began his academic career as an instructor of Hebrew at Andover Theological Seminary (1823-1826). After four years of study abroad, mostly in Germany, he returned to Andover, becoming founding editor of the Biblical Repository. He came to New York in 1837 as the chair of biblical studies at the newly formed New York Theological Seminary (now Union Theological Seminary). Among his works are A Harmony of the Gospels in Greek (1834); A Greek and English Lexicon of the New Testament (1850); and Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petraea (1841), for which he had taken an extensive leave of absence from the seminary in 1838, returning to New York in the fall of 1840. He also published an American edition of Calmet’s Dictionary of the Holy Bible (1832) and the posthumous Physical Geography of the Holy Land (1865). Robinson was the first American scholar to achieve an international reputation in biblical studies. See Robert T. Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 11-14.