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Hieronymus van der Mij (1687-1761)
Albert Schultens (1686-1750). Dated 1736. Canvas, 76.5 × 61 cm.

Leiden, Rijksuniversiteit. Commissioned by the sitter for the Senate Chamber of Leiden University.

When Schultens became professor of Hebrew and Antiquities (Archaeology) at Franeker University in 1713, he began to put into practice a system of study he had conceived when he was not yet twenty years old: comparative Semitic philology as the basis for Bible study. If Coccejus read the Bible as a product of human literary effort, Schultens went a step further, to see the very language of the Bible, old Hebrew, as a minor branch in a larger family of languages which was dominated by Arabic. In 1729 he was called to Leiden as regent of the prestigious States College, and in 1732 was appointed professor of Oriental languages. His new approach to ancient Semitic texts was not understood and appreciated by all, but the polemics in which he participated were far more scholarly and less vindictive than those in which his seventeenth-century predecessors found themselves engaged

NNBW, vol.5, cols.707-711. Ekkart 1977, nr.269.