William F. Badè

William Frederic Badè (January 22, 1871 – March 4, 1936), perhaps best known as the literary executor and biographer of John Muir, was a versatile scholar of wide interests. As an archaeologist, he led the excavation of Tell en-Nasbeh in Palestine, now believed on the basis of his work to be the biblical city of Mizpah in Benjamin. He was also an ordained Moravian minister, a professor of ancient languages, a theologian and bible scholar, a mountaineer, a conservationist and a naturalist. Born and raised in Minnesota, he studied at Moravian College and its seminary as well as other universities. He served on the faculties of Moravian Theological Seminary and then the Pacific School of Religion. He also served as interim president and subsequently as dean of the Pacific School of Religion and was founding director of the school's Palestine Institute. He was president of the Sierra Club 1919-1922 and edited the Sierra Club Bulletin for 12 years.

Badè was born in Carver, Minnesota, and grew up a few miles northwest of there on a farm near Waconia, Minnesota, in the rural community associated with Zoar Moravian Church. He was the first of ten surviving children of William Bruns (1831-1902) and Anna Voigt Badè (1850-1910), immigrants from Germany. His father was a scholar who left Hanover for political reasons; on arriving in the United States in 1858 he worked on riverboats and later farmed. Anna Voigt immigrated from Prussia in 1868; they married at Carver in 1870.

Badè attended public schools but also studied with a private tutor. He grew up speaking English and German and learned Greek and Latin as a boy. He attended Moravian College and the associated seminary, earning his way by playing organ and giving music lessons, attaining AB and BD degrees. He was ordained at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1894, and went on to Yale Divinity School to study ancient languages and Arabic, earning a second BD in 1895. After short pastoral appointments at Unionville, Michigan, and Chaska, Minnesota, he returned to Moravian College as instructor of Greek and German, earning his PhD from that institution in 1898 with a thesis on the Assyrian flood legends. He studied geology at Lehigh University (1901-1902). He also studied in Berlin (1905) and in Paris (1909). In adulthood, he could read 14 languages and converse fluently in seven.

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