Friedrich Heinrich Wilhelm, a distinguished German orientalist and biblical critic, was born in 1786 at Nordhausen, in Hanover. He was educated at the gymnasium of that town, and afterwards at the universities of Helmstadt and Göttingen. In 1806 he became magister legens, and repelent in the latter university, where he continued for three years. His studies had early been turned to the oriental languages; and the need which he soon perceived of a better mode of treating both the grammar and lexicography of the Hebrew, led him to devote himself exclusively to the elucidation of the Old Testament. This determination he formed during his residence at Göttingen, where he already made preparations for his Hebrew lexicon. In 1809 he was appointed professor of ancient literature at Heiligenstadt, whence in the following year he was transferred to Halle. After holding a subordinate office there for a year, he was chosen in 1811 ordinary professor of theology. Many offers were subsequently made to him of high preferment elsewhere, but he clung to Halle during the remainder of his life, and never left it except for an occasional literary journey to England or France or some part of Germany. It was at Halle that he died, Oct. 23, 1842.

The great literary objects to which the life of Gesenius was devoted were first the lexicography and then the grammar of the Hebrew tongue. At the early age of twenty-six he had completed his dictionary of the Old Testament, a work exhibiting a depth of research, a command of materials, and a sagacity in using them, that immediately placed its author in the first rank of modern philologists. Gesenius himself in after life came to regard this as a juvenile effort, and disavowed many of the views and results embodied in it. The lexicon was followed in 1813 by a grammar, which in its successive editions has continued to be the current and almost the only grammar of the Hebrew tongue in common use in the schools of Germany. In 1815 he conceived the idea of a thesaurus of the Hebrew language. This work he was unable to execute on the scale which he had originally proposed, and it finally took the form of a manual or lexicon for schools. In that same year appeared his *History of the Hebrew Language*, which, however, has been long since superseded by his own researches, as well as those of other scholars. Gesenius' next work was published under the title of *Lehrgebäude*, a systematic work on Hebrew grammar, a vast and valuable storehouse of the facts of Hebrew, but defective in so far as it enters little into the philosophy of the language. During these and the succeeding years Gesenius was amassing materials for his *Thesaurus*, of which the first fasciculus appeared in 1827. Various causes prevented him from bringing out the parts regularly, and death surprised him before he had quite completed the whole work. The only other important work of Gesenius which remains to be mentioned is his *Commentary on Isaiah*, on which he has brought to bear all his learning and ingenuity. His opinions as to the origin, history, and prophetical character of this book are strongly tinged with those rationalistic views with which he had allowed himself to become imbued in early life. The services which Gesenius rendered to literature by his writings were not his only or indeed his greatest ones. To him alone is due the revival of Hebrew learning in Germany, where it had almost fallen into abeyance since the time of the Buxtorfs. When he opened his course at Halle, he had only ten students; for some years before his death their numbers had increased to 500 annually. As a lecturer he was natural and animated, and always perfectly clear and intelligible. In respect of these latter qualities, indeed, his mind seemed as if cast in an English rather than a German mould. (*Robinson's Bibliotheca Sacra*; *Encycl. of Religious Knowledge*; *Encycl. des Gens du Monde*, &c.)