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Leighton Library has 1663 first edition of "Hierozoicon sive bipertitum opus De animalibus sacrae scripturae" by Samuel Bochart
Added at 07:53 on 04 September 2025
It's #NationalWildlifeDay #WildlifeDay today. Leighton Library has 1663 first edition of "Hierozoicon sive bipertitum opus De animalibus sacrae scripturae" (a zoological treatise on the animals of the bible, by French biblical scholar Samuel Bochart.
As well as being a religious version of Pliny's "Natural History" and an expansion of Conrad Gesner's "Historiae animalium" the book relates Arabic naturalists, like al-Damîrî and al-Qazwini, none of whose work had appeared in European print before.
The book was a landmark in biblical zoology, orientalist scholarship, and early modern typographic ambition. It is a two-volume encyclopedic treatise cataloguing all the animals mentioned in the Bible. It blends philology, theology, and natural history, drawing from Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and classical sources. It’s one of the earliest works to cite Arabic naturalists like al-Damîrî and al-Qazwini.
