Félix-Marie Abel

Félix-Marie Abel (December 29, 1878 – March 24, 1953) was a French archaeologist, a geographer, and a professor at the École Biblique in Jerusalem. A Dominican priest, he was one of the most prominent bible scholars in the end of Ottoman era and British Mandate era. His work "remains even today the authority on the Greek sources for Palestine", according to Benedict T. Viviano.

Abel was born in Saint-Uze, in the Drôme department, on December 29, 1878. He was ordained on February 1, 1897 at Saint-Maximin. In 1897 he arrived in Jerusalem to study in the École Biblique founded by Marie-Joseph Lagrange; Lagrange had recruited him (and ) to help him get "a clear grasp of physical environment and the cultural framework of the Bible". Abel graduated in 1900. In 1905 he became a professor at the École Biblique and served there until his death in 1953.

He published a number of studies in various disciplines—linguistics, geography, and history. His Grammaire du Grec Biblique is a grammar of Biblical Greek (1927). Preceded by a volume on Palestine in the Guide Bleu series of travel guides, his Géographie de la Palestine (Paris, 1933–1938) treats the political, historical and physical geography from the most remote times until the Byzantine period. The book has two volumes, the first a physical geography, and the second a historical geography. The study supports, for instance, the theory of William F. Lynch that the Essenes lived in a set of small caves directly above Ein Gedi (which Lynch had visited in 1848), a theory later discredited by scholarship. The topographical quality of his work was quite influential: according to Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, "The ten maps he prepared have served as the prime, but often unacknowledged, source of much subsequent topographical identification". In 1952 he published Histoire de la Palestine depuis la conquête d'Alexandre jusqu'à l'invasion arabe, a comprehensive history. He also edited and translated the Book of Joshua for the École Biblique's edition of the bible, translated the Books of the Maccabees and identified several battle sites of the Maccabean Revolt and other places that related to Hasmonean dynasty.

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