Bible. Polyglot.

6 volumes, folio (446 x 282mm.), ruled in red throughout, parallel Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Samaritan (Pentateuch), Ethiopic (Job to Malachi and New Testament), Persian (Gospels) and Arabic texts, additional title in an architectural frame by Hollar, portrait by Lombart,  double-page engraved maps, 4 engraved plates (3 double-page), woodcut illustrations and initials, uniform contemporary calf gilt, couple of small wormholes through latter half of vol. 1, occasional rusting and spotting, some small closed tears, a few pages with folds--Castell, Edmund. Lexicon heptaglotton. London: Thomas Roycroft, 1669, 2 volumes, title-page printed in red and black, engraved portrait by William Faithorne, woodcut initials, near contemporary calf, together 8 volumes, binding rather worn

a fine copy of the london, or walton, polyglot bible, a monument of english scholarship and typography.

Darlow & Moule 1446; Delaveau & Hillard 54 & 55; Wing B2797 & C1225

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, where appropriate
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It was edited by Brian Walton, and contains for the first time texts in Ethiopic and Persian, making this the most complete, as well as the last, of all the great polyglot editions. One of its most notable features is its contribution to biblical textual criticism. The New Testament has variants from the recently rediscovered Codex Alexandrinus, and the sixth volume gives an apparatus criticus from fifteen other sources. Walton received, and rebuffed, significant criticism for this editorial decision.

Walton, whose assistants on the project included Edward Pococke, Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, provided lengthy prefatory essays setting out the aims of the edition and providing an overview of oriental and biblical scholarship at this period. There are two forms of the preface. The earlier of the two acknowledges at some length the help given to the project by Oliver Cromwell. The second preface, written after the Restoration, downplays this assistance. The present copy contains the second form of the preface.

Although Walton mentions a forthcoming lexicon in his preface to the Bible, Castell's Lexicon heptaglotton, which is here as often found bound uniformly, is essentially a supplement to Walton's work.