From the very beginning of the PBI's existence, the Society of Jesus was fully committed to provide funding for the Library in order to acquire everything that it needed.

The first purchases were made prior to October 25, 1909, through the Bretschneider bookshop in Rome, and included the Patrologiae Cursus Completus (Latina and Graeca) of Fr.

J.-P. Migne, the fifty-two volume set of the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, and, amongst hundreds of other works, commentaries on the Old and New Testaments by Karl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, respectively.

These acquisitions included contemporary archaeological studies of the Ancient Near East (especially Palestine and Assyria), a collection of various exegetical and oriental periodicals, and duplicates of books in the Vatican Library.

These volumes, which remain the property of the Holy See, constitute the second important core collection of the Pontifical Biblical Institute Library.

[10] The library has also been enriched by the generosity of the professors of the PBI who have donated both rare and recent publications in the field of biblical studies.

The Library began an oriental collection in 1932 at the same time that the PBI created a second faculty dedicated to the study of the Ancient Near East.

Pierre du Bourguet, SJ, the former director of the oriental section of the Louvre Museum, made a substantial donation from his Egyptian and Coptic collections.