1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Edwards, Bela Bates

Edwards, Bela Bates (1802–1852), American man of letters, was born at Southampton, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July 1802. He graduated at Amherst College in 1824, was a tutor there in 1827–1828, graduated at Andover Theological Seminary in 1830, and was licensed to preach. From 1828 to 1833 he was assistant secretary of the American Education Society (organized in Boston in 1815 to assist students for the ministry), and from 1828 to 1842 was editor of the society’s organ, which after 1831 was called the American Quarterly Register. He also founded (in 1833) and edited the American Quarterly Observer; in 1836–1841 edited the Biblical Repository (after 1837 called the American Biblical Repository) with which the Observer was merged in 1835; and was editor-in-chief of the Bibliotheca Sacra from 1844 to 1851. In 1837 he became professor of Hebrew at Andover, and from 1848 until his death was associate professor of sacred literature there. He died at Athens, Georgia, on the 20th of April 1852. Among his numerous publications were A Missionary Gazetteer (1832), A Biography of Self-Taught Men (1832), a once widely known Eclectic Reader (1835), a translation, with Samuel Harvey Taylor (1807–1871), of Kühner’s Schulgrammatik der Griechischen Sprache and Classical Studies (1844), essays in ancient literature and art written in collaboration with Barnas Sears and C. C. Felton.

Edwards’ Addresses and Sermons, with a memoir by Rev. Edwards A. Park, were published in two volumes at Boston in 1853.