Félix-Marie Abel

Félix-Marie Abel was born in 1878 in Saint-Uze

Abel was born on 29 December 1878 in Saint-Uze, in the Drôme department of France. He studied at the Preparatory Seminary of Valence and became a Dominican priest.

He came to Jerusalem to study at the École Biblique, founded by Marie-Joseph Lagrange. In 1905 he became a professor there, teaching Church history, Greek, topography, archaeology and Coptic. He specialized in epigraphy, and many of his works dealt with reading inscriptions.

With Louis-Hugues Vincent he studied Jerusalem, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Emmaus and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. In 1908 he surveyed sites in the Jordan Valley and around the Dead Sea. He wrote a grammar of Biblical Greek, a two-volume geography of Palestine, a translation of the Books of the Maccabees and a history of Palestine from Alexander to the Arab conquest.

He was among the first members of the Palestine Oriental Society, founded in 1920, and served as its vice president from 1946 to 1948. He died in 1953 and was buried in the courtyard of the Saint-Étienne monastery in Jerusalem.