1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hackett, Horatio Balch

HACKETT, HORATIO BALCH (1808–1875), American biblical scholar, was born in Salisbury, Massachusetts, on the 27th of December 1808. He was educated at Phillips-Andover Academy, at Amherst College, where he graduated as valedictorian in 1830, and at Andover Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1834. He was adjunct professor of Latin and Greek Languages and Literature at Brown University in 1835–1838 and professor of Hebrew Literature there in 1838–1839, was ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1839—he had become a Baptist at Andover as the result of preparing a paper on baptism in the New Testament and the Fathers—and in 1839–1868 he was professor of Biblical literature and interpretation in Newton Theological Institution where his most important work was the introduction of the modern German methods of Biblical criticism, which he had learned from Moses Stuart at Andover and with which he made himself more familiar in Germany (especially under Tholuck at Halle) in 1841. He travelled in Egypt and Palestine in 1852, and in 1858–1859 in Greece, becoming proficient in modern Greek. From 1870 until his death in Rochester, New York, on the 2nd of November 1875, he was professor of Biblical literature and New Testament exegesis in the Rochester Theological Seminary. He was a great teacher but a greater critical and exegetical scholar.

He wrote Christian Memorials of the War (1864); an English version of Winer’s Grammar of the Chaldee Language (1844); Exercises in Hebrew Grammar (1847); and various articles on the Semitic language and literature in periodicals; but his best-known work was in general commentary on the Bible and translation, and in the special text study of the New Testament. Under these two headings fall: Illustrations of Scripture; suggested by a Tour through the Holy Land (1855); the American revision, with Ezra Abbot, of Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, to the British edition of which he had contributed about thirty articles; Commentary on the Original Text of the Acts of the Apostles (1852; 2nd edition, 1858), for many years the best English commentary; Notes on the Greek Text of the Epistle of Paul to Philemon, and a Revised Version of Philemon, both published in 1860; the English versions, in Schaff’s edition of Lange’s Commentaries, of Van Oosterzee’s Philemon and Braune’s Philippians; and for the American Bible Union Version of the Bible he translated the books of Ruth and Judges, and aided T. J. Conant in editorial revision; and he was one of the American translators for the English Bible revision.

See Memorials of Horatio Balch Hackett (Rochester, N.Y., 1876), edited by G. H. Whittemore.