Protestants treated biblical language study as a path to salvation.

Evidence

Greek and Hebrew were not regarded by sixteenth-century Protestants as marginal subjects, primarily fit for drilling the unformed minds of public schoolboys. Rather, close study of the languages of the Bible was one of the keys to eternal salvation. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 144

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the theological motive force behind early Orientalist philology — why these scholars cared about Hebrew, Greek, and later Arabic at all.
• XREF: Explains why early Arabic study in Europe emerged from a biblical/salvific frame rather than secular curiosity — echoes the later Protestant-to-Catholic shift the next paragraph describes.

Related

• Eighteenth-century scholars studied Arabic to illuminate the Bible (similarity 0.81)