The promise of remarkable books drew Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) toward languages he had not yet mastered. He later recalled an encounter in Paris in 1562, when he shared a bed at a printer’s house with Guillaume Postel (1510–1581). Postel urged him to learn Hebrew and related languages, describing the untranslated learning they would make available. For a young scholar, the invitation offered access to a past still largely closed to his contemporaries.
Scaliger took the learning more readily than the conclusions. He came to admire the range of Postel’s knowledge while distrusting his judgment about history. The distinction shaped his own work with calendars and chronologies. Ancient peoples had counted years differently, begun them at different times, and preserved accounts that could not simply be placed beside one another as if their dates already agreed.
Establishing when an event occurred required patient comparison. A witness had to be situated in time before his testimony could carry the weight later readers placed upon it. The same demand applied to a recovered history whose ancient author appeared to know just what a modern scholar needed. Linguistic learning could open the text, but it could also reveal why its claim to antiquity was doubtful.
Scaliger’s work did more than replace one imagined beginning with another. It improved the means of deciding which beginnings the evidence would support. That achievement did not require abandoning every religious commitment, and it did not bring the disputes over sacred chronology to an end. It made agreement harder to manufacture by arranging quotations. Scaliger could admire Postel’s command of Arabic while dismissing the historical conclusions that he drew from it. The learning remained worth acquiring even when its teacher had become an unreliable guide.