Item #122713 [Sefer Tehilim] The Book of Psalmes with the New English Translation, published by John Leusden, Professor of the Hebrew Tongue in the University of Utrecht. Psalter in Hebrew and English.

[Psalter in Hebrew and English]

[Sefer Tehilim] The Book of Psalmes with the New English Translation, published by John Leusden, Professor of the Hebrew Tongue in the University of Utrecht

London, Printed by Samuel Smith [for John Leusden], 1688.

Duodecimo, [iv], 240, [2] leaves with English on the rectos and Hebrew on the versos (running right to left).

Modern full leather lettered and decorated in gilt on the spine (with one tiny nick to the rear joint); early colouring on the edges; decorated title leaf a little marked, with a slight surface blemish near the imprint; light tidemark in the gutter and bottom inner corner of the first 60 leaves (thereafter unobtrusive or not visible); occasional light foxing; trifling signs of use and age; overall an excellent copy.

A pocket Psalter with parallel text in Hebrew (Johann Leusden's influential edition) and English (the Authorised Version). In his introduction Leusden dedicates this edition to 'the very Reverend and pious John Eliot. The Indefatigable and faithfull Minister ... and Venerable Apostle of the Indians in America; Who hath translated into, and published in, the American tongue, by an Antlaean Labour, the Bible and several English practical Tractats [sic], together with Catechisms; being the first who preached the word of God to the Americans in the Indian tongue, and gathered a Church of Indian Converts, and administrat[ed] the Holy Supper to them. As also' to twenty-four unnamed Native American ministers, early converts to Christianity, preaching in the colonies. In response to a letter from Puritan clergyman Increase Mather, he writes that the edition is published 'when there is a great door of the Gospel opened in New-England by means of the Illustrious School at Boston [Harvard]: for at present they have there four and twenty Churches and Meeting-places of Indians; over whom four and twenty Indian Ministers are placed'.

Another issue of this edition was published with the imprint of John van de Water of Utrecht in the same year (1688). The identical typography and woodcut device may suggest that both were printed at Utrecht.