Cocceius

Cocceius, or KOCH, JOHANNES, a distinguished theologian, was born at Bremen in 1603, and studied at Hamburg and Franeker. In 1636 he became professor of Hebrew there, and in 1650 of Theology at Leyden, where he died in 1669. His chief work is the Lexicon et Commentarius Sermonis Hebraici et Chaldaici Veteris Testamenti (Leyden, 1669), the first tolerably complete dictionary of the Hebrew language. Cocceius held very peculiar hermeneutical principles, which enabled him to discover the whole New Testament in the Old. The representation abundantly employed in the former of a covenant between God and man, usurped the place of the New Testament doctrine of the Fatherhood and Sonship; and Cocceius carried the 'covenant theology,' as it is called, to an absurd extreme (see COVENANT). The most complete exposition of his views is in his Summa Doctrinæ de Fædere et Testamento Dei (1648).