François Vatable[1] (late 15th century – 16 March 1547) was a French humanist scholar, a Hellenist and Hebraist.
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Born in Gamaches, Somme, he was for a time rector of Bramet in Valois, in 1530 or 1531. Francis I of France appointed him to the chair of Hebrew in the newly-founded (1530) College of the Three Languages, afterwards better known as the Collège de France. At a later date a royal grant conferred upon Vatable the title of Abbot of Bellozane, with the benefices attached thereto. Vatable is regarded as the restorer of Hebrew scholarship in France, and his lectures in Paris attracted a large audience including Jews.
He was a friend of Robert Estienne.
He published nothing during his lifetime. He had, however, completed a Latin translation of Aristotle's Meteorologica, which appeared at Lyon in 1548, and another of the same author's Parva Naturalia, which was published in Paris (1619).
From the lecture notes taken by Vatable's pupils, Robert Estienne drew the material for the scholia which he added to his edition of the new Latin translation of the Bible by Leo of Judah (4 vols., Paris, 1539–45). The Sorbonne doctors sharply inveighed against the Lutheran tendencies of the notes of Stephen's Bible, and Vatable himself disowned them; yet, as they are a model of clear, concise literary, and critical exegesis, the Salamanca theologians, with the authorization of the Spanish Inquisition, issued a new thoroughly-revised edition of them in their Latin Bible of 1584. From the edition of 1729 which Migne republished in his Scripturae sacrae cursus completus (1841), the scholia on the Book of Esdras and Book of Nehemiah. The notes on the Psalms, re-edited in Stephens's Liber Psalmorum Davidis (1557), were printed again, together with remarks of Hugo Grotius, by Vogel under the misleading title: Francisci Vatabli annotationes in Psalmos (1767).