Het algemeen groot historisch, oordeelkundig, chronologisch, geografisch, en letterlyk naam- en woord-boek, van den gantschen H. Bybel.

First Dutch edition of Dom Augustin Calmet’s Dictionnaire historique, critique, chronologique, géographique et littéral de la Bible, published in Leiden by Samuel Luchtmans in 1725-1727 in two large folio volumes. Mattheus Gargon, a Reformed minister and rector of the Latin school at Vlissingen, did more than translate the French work first issued in 1722: he enlarged it and added his own annotations. The Dutch undertaking was later completed in 1731 by a two-volume supplement prepared by Jakob van Ostade and Arnold Heinrich Westerhoff.

Titles printed in red and black, each with an engraved vignette. The first volume opens with a frontispiece signed “Ph. a Gunst fecit”, accompanied by a verse from the Gospel of John, followed by an engraved dedication to the burgomasters and magistrates of Leiden within a frame of their coats of arms. It also contains two headpieces, 7 maps - including Calmet’s map of the Promised Land based on the Book of Joshua - and 35 plates, several double-page. The second volume contains a further headpiece, 60 plates and 4 plates of medals. Costumes, monuments, instruments, ritual objects, views and antiquities give the biblical world an almost tangible presence.

Modern retrospective binding in full brown calf, raised bands, gilt floral compartments, lettering- and numbering-pieces, gilt roll to the board edges. Spines faded, some rubbing. Scattered foxing and spotting; paper unevenly browned or yellowed, with some leaves more strongly affected. In volume II, one plate has a restored 10 cm tear. In volume I, p. 265, a few words are underlined in blue pencil.

In 1722, Calmet had published in Paris a work conceived as the alphabetical counterpart to his vast Commentaire littéral sur tous les livres de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament. History, geography, chronology, ancient languages and Jewish antiquities were brought together in order first to clarify the historical and literal meaning of Scripture. Its success quickly moved beyond the Catholic world: only three years later, the dictionary reached Leiden and, in part, acquired another voice.

Gargon was then minister at Vlissingen, where he also directed the Latin school. Known in Dutch letters for his Walchersche Arkadia, he undertook here one of the last major projects of his career; in his hands, the work of a Benedictine abbé from Lorraine became a book for the Reformed readership of the United Provinces, translated, annotated and enlarged rather than merely reproduced. Its passage from one confessional world to another did not efface Calmet; it expanded him.

The illustrations fully participate in that process. The Bible is no longer explained by text alone; it unfolds through maps, coins, garments, monuments, tools and objects of worship, as though scholarship sought to restore around the words the material world they had lost. Philipp van Gunst’s frontispiece, the maps and the large double-page plates give these two volumes a breadth far beyond that of an ordinary dictionary.

A few years later, Samuel Luchtmans would become printer to the University of Leiden; the house founded by his family in the seventeenth century would eventually become Brill in the nineteenth. This first Dutch translation thus belongs to the early history of one of Leiden’s great traditions of scholarly publishing.

From Paris to Leiden, the text changes language, milieu and readership, yet retains the same ambition: to make the Bible more intelligible by restoring it to its history, its places and its objects.