CAPPEL, LOUIS (1585-1658), French Huguenot divine and scholar, was born at St. Elier, near Sedan. He studied theology at Sedan and Saumur; and Arabic at Oxford, where he spent two years. In 1613 he accepted the chair of Hebrew at Saumur, and in 1633 became professor of theology. As a Hebrew scholar he concluded that the vowel points and accents were not an original part of Hebrew, but were inserted by the Massorete Jews of Tiberias, not earlier than the 5th century A.D., and that the prim itive Hebrew characters are those now known as the Samaritan, while the square characters are Aramaic and were substituted for the more ancient at the time of the captivity. Cappel's im portant Critica Sacra (1634) met with such theological opposition that he was only able to print it at Paris in 165o, by the aid of a son who had turned Catholic. The various readings in the Old Testament text and the differences between the ancient versions and the Massoretic text convinced him that the integrity of the Hebrew text, as held by Protestants. was untenable. This amounted to an attack on the verbal inspiration of Scripture.
Bitter, however, as was the opposition, it was not long before his results were accepted by scholars.
Cappel's other works include the Annotationes et Commentarii in Vetus Testamentum, Chronologia Sacra, Arcanum Punctuationis reve latum (1624), the Diatriba de veris et antiquis Ebraeorum literis (1645), and Commentarius de Capellorum genie, which give an ac count of his family. See Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopcdie.