Biography
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 from 1846 to 1849.
He was ordained in 1848 and was pastor of the Central Presbyterian church of Philadelphia from 1849 to 1851. From August 1851 until his death, in Princeton, New Jersey, aged 75, 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. His Grammar of the Hebrew Language (1861, revised 1888) was a distinct improvement in method on Gesenius, Rödiger, 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)
- 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 American Presbyterianism, and was the moderator of the General Assembly of 1891. Green was chairman of the Old Testament committee of the Anglo-American Bible revision committee.
Read more about this topic: William Henry Green
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)