ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

"William McLett Thomasson"

- CONTENT -
· Without content
William McClure Thomson; 31 December 1806, Springdale Ohio, 8 April 1894, Denver, Colorado, the United States) was an American Protestant mission, which lived nearly two years in Lebanon and the Land of Israel and published a book about the Bible.

His life and his actions.
Thomson was the son of a Persian pastor. He studied at the University of Miami in Ohio and theological Seminary in Princeton and in 1833 was sent to Levant. He first landed in the port of Beirut, and after a year in Lebanon he moved with his wife to Jerusalem. In April 1834, when the rioters broke out in the Land of Israel, he trained his people to accept our behalf and was arrested on suspicion of spying. Jerusalem has only returned after its occupation by the Afghan army. In his absence, his wife gave his son and died shortly after his return. Thomson returned with his baby son and settled in Beirut, which was the basis of his activity in the region in the coming years, mainly for the transfer of Christians and Jews to Protestants. In 1835, he established a school for boys in Beirut, and in 1843 he co-founded with the American physician and missionary Cornelius van Dyke a seminar for suburban rashes in the town of eBay. Thomson was appointed with the founders of the Syrian Protestant College, which was opened in 1866 and was published in 1922 as the American University in Beirut.

During his stay in the area, Thomson was closely related to difficult events. In 1837, he came to tuberculosis two weeks after the devastating earthquake in the funeral of a doctor and provided assistance to the victims. The detailed report given by Thomson about the disaster has been widely published and copied in many books. In 1840, during the Second Egyptian-Jewish War, Panana with the rest of American missionaries to Cyprus for about a month until the coast shelling ended. That same year, battles broke between the Druze and the Maroons in Lebanon that also damaged his work. In 1845, they returned to the area of bloody disputes between the Druze and the Marlons, and Memson was involved in preparing peace instead. In 1851, he was inadvertent to the side, and from there he managed the Mission Station in Azkabia. In 1857, he returned to the United States for two years to address the production of his book on the Holy Land. In 1860, a civil war broke out between the Druze and the Maroons on the Lebanon Hills that was accompanied by massacres. Thomson helped the victims with food distribution, clothing and medication as well as a consultant for the British diplomat, Lord Duffrin, in a delegation who studied the causes of murderous sectarian conflicts in Lebanon. Thomson was named by the locals called Abu Tanghara (ابو, “father of the pot”) because of his wide-scale hat. He returned to his country in 1876, lived for several years in New York and moved in 1890 to Denver, Colorado, where he died in 1894.

Land and Book of Books

In the long period of time in which he was in Levant, Thomson learned to know Israel well. Ernest Rennan, one of the most important studies of the East, said that Thomson held several more tours in Israel than any scholar during his time. Thanks to his knowledge of the languages of the place, Thomson served as an interpreter for the Biblical researchers who visited the area. In 1852, he accompanied Edward Robinson, of the founders of biblical archaeology, on his second journey in Israel. Natural researcher Henry Baker Tristram relied on his journey in Israel for Thomason’s book, which he called “the man of missionaries in Syria,” and pointed out not one of his descriptions and claims. The two thought of a trip along the Jordan River, "a place that [Humson] had not yet reached," and even discussed meeting "in the southern end of the Sea of Salt, when the Dr. would return from Sinai, a place he was going to go out to prepare material for another soft", but their plan did not work.

"The Land and the Book" - The Land and the Book.
The book, which first published in 1859, appeared in the next four years in various editions, in the United States and England, and