Edward Robinson

Edward Robinson (1794-1863) was an American biblical scholar and geographer, Professor of Biblical Literature at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and widely regarded as the founder of modern biblical geography. His two journeys through Palestine — in 1838 with the missionary linguist Eli Smith, and again in 1852 — established the methodological foundation for the scientific study of biblical lands.

Robinson's decisive insight was that Arabic place-names preserved by the rural Palestinian population frequently retained the underlying Hebrew or Aramaic toponyms of the biblical period, often with predictable phonological shifts. By systematically recording Arabic names from local informants and correlating them with biblical and classical geographical references, Robinson and Smith identified more than one hundred sites whose biblical identifications had been lost for centuries. Their identifications of Beitin as Bethel, Jib as Gibeon, Anata as Anathoth, Mukhmas as Michmash, and many others remain accepted today and underpin every subsequent excavation at those locations.

During his 1838 survey Robinson identified the massive springer stone protruding from the southwest corner of the Temple Mount platform as the remnant of a Herodian-period monumental arch carrying a staircase up from the Tyropoeon Valley — a feature now universally known as Robinson's Arch.

His three-volume "Biblical Researches in Palestine" (1841) and follow-up "Later Biblical Researches in Palestine" (1856) became the founding texts of biblical archaeology before excavation as a discipline existed. Robinson also produced a widely used Greek-English New Testament lexicon (1836). He received the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1842, the first American so honored, in recognition of work that shifted Palestinian topography from speculation onto an empirical foundation.