BAMPTON LECTURES. A Church of England course of Lectures on Divinity delivered at Oxford, and named after their founder, the Rev. John Bampton. Bampton was a Prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral. He died in 1751, leaving a legacy of £120 per annum for the endow ment of eight lectures. The lectures are delivered as sermons at Great St. Mary's, and are afterwards published. The object of the lectures is " to confirm and establish the Christian faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics, upon the divine authority of the holy Scriptures, upon the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers as to the faith and practice of the primitive Church. upon the divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, upon the divinity of the Holy Ghost, upon the articles of the Christian Faith as com prehended in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds." BAN. In the Old Testament we often read of things or persons being put under a ban, that is to say, being devoted to Jehovah by destruction. The term use (hm, Greek livciOspa ; Authorised Version " accursed thing "; Revised Version " devoted thing") is derived from a common Semitic root. It is the root from which harem
(a place consecrated or set apart) comes. Amongst the things devoted to Jehovah were : idols (Deuteronomy vii. 25). Canaanite cities (Dent. xx. 16-18), enemies (I. Samuel xv.; cp. the Moabite Stone 1. 16 f.), property (Micah iv. 13), and guilty persons (Joshua vii.). Sometimes the devoted thing seems to have been a kind of free-will offering or sacrifice to Jehovah. Leviticus xxvii. 2S says that " no devoted thing, that a man shall devote unto the Lord of all that he bath, whether of man or beast, or of the field of his possession, shall be sold or redeemed; every devoted thing is most holy unto the Lord. None devoted. which shall be devoted of men, shall be ran somed: he shall surely be put to death." Apparently the idea in such cases was to purchase by a vow the friendly aid of the deity. See Eneyel. Bibl.