58), French Protestant divine and scholar, a
Huguenot whose descent is traced above, was born at St Elier, near
Sedan, in 1585. He studied theology at Sedan and Saumur; and Arabic at
Oxford, where he spent two years. At the age of twenty-eight he accepted
the chair of Hebrew at Saumur, and twenty years afterwards was
appointed professor of theology. Amongst his fellow lecturers were Moses
Amyraut and Josue de la Place. As a Hebrew scholar he made a special
study of the history of the Hebrew text, which led him to the conclusion
that the vowel points and accents are not an original part of the Hebrew
language, but were inserted by the Massorete Jews of Tiberias, not
earlier than the 5th century A.D., and that the primitive Hebrew
characters are those now known as the Samaritan, while the square
characters are Aramaic and were substituted for the more ancient at the
time of the captivity. These conclusions were hotly contested by
Johannes Buxtorf, being in conflict with the views of his father,
Johannes Buxtorf senior, notwithstanding the fact that Elias Levita had
already disputed the antiquity of the vowel points and that neither
Jerome nor the Talmud shows any acquaintance with them. His second
important work, _Critica Sacra_, was distasteful from a theological
point of view. He had completed it in 1634; but owing to the fierce
opposition with which he had to contend, he was only able to print it at
Paris in 1650, by aid of a son, who had turned Catholic. The various
readings in the Old Testament text and the differences between the
ancient versions and the Massoretic text convinced him that the idea of
the integrity of the Hebrew text, as commonly held by Protestants, was
untenable. This amounted to an attack on the verbal inspiration of
Scripture. Bitter, however, as was the opposition to his views, it was
not long before his results were accepted by scholars.

Cappel was also the author of _Annotationes et Commentarii in Vetus
Testamentum_, _Chronologia Sacra_, and other biblical works, as well
as of several other treatises on Hebrew, among which are the _Arcanum
Punctuationis revelatum_ (1624) and the _Diatriba de veris et antiquis
Ebraeorum literis_ (1645). His _Commentarius de Capellorum gente_,
giving an account of the family to which he belonged, was published by
his nephew James Cappel (1639-1722), who, at the age of eighteen,
became professor of Hebrew at Saumur, but, on the revocation of the