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The outstanding nineteenth-century biblical scholar and Semitist William Robertson Smith gave three courses of Burnett Lectures on the religion of the Semites at Aberdeen just over a century ago. The first series, published in 1889, has long been a classic work but the second and third series were never published owing to the author's ill health. However, the manuscript remained in Cambridge University Library where it was recently rediscovered by John Day. This volume presents an edited version of these important lectures, with a critical introduction and a collection of press reports from the time of their first presentation.

William Robertson Smith (1846-94) was one of the most profound and versatile Victorian thinkers--a principal figure in the development of social anthropology and the founder of modern sociology of religion. In W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion, T. O. Beidelman, a renowned anthropologist and ethnographer, relates Smith's personality and career to the radical nature of his investigations. His study contains the only readily available account of Smith's life, and represents the only attempt to place Smith's work within the contemporary perspective of the field of social studies. Professor Beidelman discusses how Smith introduced to Britain the revolutionary interpretations in the fields of biblical and Semitic literary studies first formulated by Continental scholars, as well his original views on the interrelationship between human psychology, social structure, and history. The author also reviews the intellectual background and basic themes of Smith's work, the impact that it had upon his contemporaries, and the later influence that his theories had upon such diverse thinkers as Durkheim, Mauss, Hubert, Frazer, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, and Freud. In his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, his last and most famous work, Smith sought to define the essential nature of religious behavior, and he approached the analysis of social institutions through comparative and historical studies. This is a problem that remains central to social anthropology, and the general methods by which Smith endeavored to clarify it are still employed today. Professor Beidelman indicates the ways in which Smith may still be read with profit, and he supplements his study with an extensive bibliography of works by and about this influential thinker.

The outstanding nineteenth-century biblical scholar and Semitist William Robertson Smith gave three courses of Burnett Lectures on the Religion of the Semites at Aberdeen just over a century ago. The first series, published in 1889 (2nd edn, 1894), has long been a classic work. The second and third series were never published, owing to the author's ill health; however, the manuscript of them still exists in the Cambridge University Library and was recently discovered by John Day, who has produced this edited version of the work to commemorate the centenary of Smith's death. The Lectures, which constitute a work of considerable Semitic and Classical learning, are on the following subjects: Feasts, Priests and the Priestly Oracle, Prophecy and Divination, Semitic Polytheism and Cosmogony. Dr Day has written an Introduction, which evaluates the work and includes nineteenth-century press reports of the Lectures.