Brian Walton (bishop) - The Polyglot Bible

The Polyglot Bible

The proposals for the Polyglot appeared in 1652. The book itself came out in six great folios. The first volume appeared in September, 1654; the second in July, 1655; the third in July, 1656; and the last three in 1657. Nine languages are used: Hebrew, Chaldee, Samaritan, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Ethiopic, Greek and Latin. Among his collaborators were James Ussher, John Lightfoot and Edward Pococke, Edmund Castell, Abraham Wheelocke and Patrick Young, Thomas Hyde and Thomas Greaves. The great undertaking was supported by liberal subscriptions, and Walton's political opinions did not deprive him of the help of the Commonwealth; the paper used was freed from duty, and the interest of Cromwell in the work was acknowledged in the original preface, part, of which was afterwards cancelled to make way for more loyal expressions towards that restored monarchy under which Oriental studies in England immediately began to languish. To Walton himself, however, the Restoration brought no disappointment. He was consecrated bishop of Chester in December 1660. In the following spring he was one of the commissioners at the Savoy Conference, but took little part in the business. In the autumn of 1661 he paid a short visit to his diocese, and returning to London he died.

However much Walton was indebted to his helpers, the Polyglot Bible is a great monument of industry and of capacity for directing a vast undertaking, and the Prolegomena (separately reprinted by Dathe, 1777, and by Francis Wrangham, 1825) show judgment as well as learning. The same qualities appear in Walton's Considerator Considered (1659), a reply to the Considerations of John Owen, who thought that the accumulation of material for the revision of the received text tended to atheism. Among Walton's works must also be mentioned an Introductio ad lectionem linguarum orientalium (1654; 2nd ed., 1655), meant to prepare the way for the Polyglot. In 1669, Dr. Edmund Castell published the "Lexicon Heptaglotton" in two folio volumes. This was a lexicon of the seven Oriental languages used in Walton's Polyglot, and had grammars of those languages prefixed.