BATE, JULIUS°

BATE, JULIUS° (1711–1771), English Christian Hebraist. As a member of the Hutchinsonians (a Christian sect) he was involved in a controversy with Bishop William Warburton (1698–1779) on the latter's Divine Legation of Moses (1737), and with Benjamin Kennicott (1718–1783) on the published emendations of the masoretic text (1751). Bate's mastery of the Hebrew Bible is demonstrated in his most famous work Critica Hebraica (1767), a Hebrew-English dictionary in which the biblical words are reduced to their original roots and their specific forms illustrated and exemplified by passages cited at length from the Scriptures. A strong Christian piety pervades this work and his translation of the Bible which goes to the end of II Kings (1773). He wrote various pamphlets in defense of biblical mysticism. (Zev Garber)