William Robertson Smith

William Robertson Smith (1846 to 1894) was a Scottish orientalist, Old Testament scholar, professor of divinity and minister of the Free Church of Scotland, born at Keig in Aberdeenshire. He took the chair of Hebrew at the Aberdeen Free Church College in 1870 but lost it in 1881 after a heresy trial that followed his Encyclopaedia Britannica articles, which treated religious topics without endorsing the Bible as literally true. He then moved to the University of Cambridge, where he became Reader in Arabic, University Librarian and Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic, and in 1887 he became editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (1885) relied on the anthropology of John Ferguson McLennan, a basis that later scholars have found defective, and his Religion of the Semites (1889), a foundational text in the comparative study of religion, pioneered the use of sociology in the analysis of religious phenomena. He died of tuberculosis at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1894.