SOURCE: “Spinoza and Bible Scholarship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 383-407.

[In the essay that follows, Popkin studies the Biblical scholarship of the Theological-Political Treatise,evaluating the ways in which Spinoza's religious views reflected his overriding rational secularism.]

Spinoza is usually considered one of the creators of modern Biblical scholarship and Biblical criticism because of the views about the Bible that he expressed in the Theological-Political Treatise and in some of his letters. In this chapter I shall briefly indicate a way in which Spinoza's views might have developed, then present what his views are, and compare and contrast them with those of some of his contemporaries. Finally I will try to evaluate the extent of his originality.

The usual picture of Spinoza's development is taken from what appears in “the oldest biography,” attributed to one Jean-Maximillien Lucas; in the Life of Spinoza by Johann Colerus; and from occasional remarks by Spinoza. Spinoza is seen as being born into, and growing up in, a rigid orthodox Jewish community in Amsterdam. He studied in the school of the Portuguese Jewish Synagogue. As a youth he began questioning some of what he was being taught, and by 1655 was rejecting the theological assumptions of the Jewish community, and the views of his teachers, the rabbis of Amsterdam. In July 1656 he was excommunicated, charged with holding outrageous beliefs and execrable practices.¹

From what we now know about the community, the traditional account has to be taken with many grains of salt. The community was not a typical orthodox Jewish one, but rather an amazingly atypical one. Most of its members had been raised in Spain and Portugal as Catholics, and fled to Amsterdam because of persecution by the Inquisition. They were originally Marranos, so-called secret Jews, the descendants of forced converts who secretly maintained some aspects of Judaism, usually just a spiritualized Judaism with minimal practices (since any over practices could lead to Inquisition punishment). The community at the time of Spinoza had unified into one group with its own school to teach the young, the adult, and the old the rudiments of Judaism. Since almost all of the members of the community had been raised in Christian countries, and were educated in Christian schools, many had a minimal knowledge of Judaism and its practices. Very, very few of the group knew any Hebrew.²

From records of the Synagogue, which only became available after World War II, after they were recovered by the Dutch government from enormous thefts by the Nazis, we now know that the school tried to teach the Bible, some rudimentary Hebrew, Jewish history and beliefs, and Jewish answers to Christian conversionist arguments. Some of its leading teachers, Menasseh ben Israel, Judah Leon, and Isaac Aboab, translated prayers, prayer books, parts of the Bible, and other essential items into Spanish, the learned language of most of the members.

Because few members had really carried on many Jewish practices in Spain and Portugal, and knew only fragmentarily about what the practices were, people had to be taught them. When the practices were too arduous (such as adult circumcision) or in conflict with people's beliefs, some kind of explanation had to be offered. Menasseh ben Israel's first great work, The Conciliator, which appeared in Spanish and Latin in 1633, attempted to show how to explain apparent conflicts of passages in the Bible using Jewish, Christian, and ancient Greek philosophical materials. The work is not a typical work of Jewish apologetics. There is not much like it in Jewish literature, because it is written in the special context of Amsterdam, where people had no Jewish background, and found all kinds of difficulties in understanding what they were supposed to do, and what they were supposed to believe.

We know that from at least 1617 onward there were troublemakers in the community, people who refused to accept the views of the rabbis as to what constituted Judaism or its practices. First one David Farrar, and then Uriel da Costa, challenged the official views. They were both excommunicated from the Amsterdam Synagogue. Without going into their cases, what is of interest is that especially in Da Costa's case, he appealed to literalism about the Biblical text, and to a rational reading of the text, against the rabbinical readings.³

The usual and traditional body of learning that Jewish children acquire, studying the Bible and the Talmud in the original languages, was beyond what was carried on in Amsterdam. Neither the teachers nor the students knew enough Hebrew or Aramaic. The main texts had first to be translated into Spanish. The traditional Bible interpreters, Rashi, Kimchi, Abarbenel, Aben Ezra, and so forth, were usually known only in fragments at best, by those who did not know enough Hebrew. And the rabbis, except for Menasseh and chief rabbi Morteira, did not know enough about traditional Judaism to answer complex and deep questions.⁴

In this milieu, young Spinoza, of the first generation of students born as Jews (not as secret Jews, Marranos) in Amsterdam, attended school. Spinoza knew Hebrew. He seems to have been a star student. At some time, undatable, he began to have questions about what he was being taught, questions about the content of the Bible, about the status of the Bible, and about Jewish explanations. In the Theological-Political Treatise he says that “I have been educated from boyhood in the accepted beliefs concerning the Bible,” namely that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, and that the Bible is the Word of God.⁵ By 1655 there are indications that Spinoza, and some others (Juan de Prado and Daniel Ribera) were raising questions about the status of the Bible and its contents.⁶ When requested to apologize, and be quiet, Spinoza refused. He was apparently offered a large sum of money just to keep his views to himself, and to appear a few times a year at the Synagogue. By the time of the excommunication he had moved out of the Jewish Community, and into the world of the radical nondenominational Protestants. When and how he met them, whether through his Latin teacher, van den Enden, through the business he and his brother were engaged in, or through the presence of these Protestants, including Quakers, in the Synagogue, we do not know.⁷

The excommunication statement accuses Spinoza of holding to abominable heresies, but does not name any. Spinoza apparently wrote an answer in Spanish, that existed at the time of his death in 1677. This may have included the basis of the analysis of the Bible that appeared in the Theological-Political Treatise.

In terms of the history of Bible scholarship and Biblical criticism, one of Spinoza's main points, that Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch, is central in the reconsideration of what the Bible is, and how it should be read and interpreted.

Spinoza said, “To treat the matter in logical order, I shall first deal with misconceptions regarding the true authorship of the Sacred Books, beginning with the Pentateuch. The author is almost universally believed to be Moses, a view so obstinately defended by the Pharisees that they have regarded any other view as a heresy” (TTP viii.161).

Spinoza then mentioned that Aben Ezra, a medieval Spanish rabbi (1092-1167) who wrote an important commentary on the Bible, “a man of enlightened mind and considerable learning … was the first, as far as I know, to call attention to this misconception.” He “did not venture to explain his meaning openly, and expressed himself somewhat obscurely” (TTP viii.161-2). Spinoza's evidence for denying the Mosaic authorship is a version of what Aben Ezra had offered.

To appreciate what Spinoza was stating, it may help to review the state of the question in the mid-seventeenth century. There had been an immense amount of scholarship regarding the Bible in the two hundred years before Spinoza. The Jewish Bible commentators were discovered by Christian scholars and were edited and studied, and used in Christian commentaries. The existing manuscripts of the Bible in many languages were carefully examined and studied. New editions of the Bible occurred, sometimes offering very important textual changes (as in Erasmus's edition of the New Testament, omitting the line stating the doctrine of the Trinity).

Aben Ezra was recognized as an important commentator by Christian and Jewish scholars. In fact he was the favorite Jewish commentator, the one who was studied most, for Christian exegetes.⁸ In his commentary on Deuteronomy, he had pointed out that Moses could not have written the passage in Deuteronomy 33 about the death of Moses, and what happened thereafter. Aben Ezra did not make any drastic claims about what this indicated about the authorship question. Rather he suggested that the post-Mosaic and non-Mosaic verses probably had some special status and meaning. (There is nothing to suggest Spinoza's view that he was a pre-Spinoza Spinozist.)⁹ His commentary on the Pentateuch was one of the major ones read during the late Middle Ages and thereafter. It was first published in the late fifteenth century. It also appears alongside the Hebrew text in the Venetian Bomberg edition of the Old Testament, published first in 1546, and reprinted a few times thereafter. His views were known to Christian and Jewish Scripture scholars. They are cited in the very widely read Scrutiny of the Scriptures, by Pablo de Santa Maria, Bishop of Burgos, and formerly rabbi of Burgos (Paulus Burgensis). The work was of great importance in making Jewish exegesis known to Christian readers, and was a much studied controversial work by both Christians and Jews.¹⁰

In Reformation literature about the Old Testament, the news that Moses did not write the passage about his own death was accepted by Andraes von Karlstadt. Martin Luther agreed that this portion of the text had been added by another hand. But he held that Moses was the author of the material up to that point. Luther dismissed incipient skepticism about the Mosaic authorship by saying “it does no harm to say that the Pentateuch could not have been written by Moses” (Greenslade 1963: 7,87). Various late-sixteenth-century commentaries, using Aben Ezra, showed that there were difficulties in assuming the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (Greenslade 1963: 92).

One finds in various Christian commentaries of the seventeenth century, that when the author got to the passage about the death of Moses, the commentator just said that this passage was not written by Moses, but probably by Joshua. And then, we are told, the passage about the death of Joshua was also written by somebody else. The commentators did not seem to see this as a special or difficult problem, even though it was accepted by them that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch.

To indicate how accepted the view was that Moses did not write the Moses death scene, I will cite from standard commentaries. The great English Hebraist, John Lightfoot, said in 1647, “The last Chapter of the Booke was written by some other than Moses; for it retaleth his death and, and how he was buryed by the Lord” (Lightfoot 1647: 79); John Richardson, Bishop of Ardagh in Ireland said in 1655, “The last Chapter of Deuteronomie was written after Moses' death. As likewise the Conclusion of the Book of Jeremie was written after his death” (Richardson 1655).¹¹

There were some efforts to offer a way in which Moses could have written the passage about his own death. God could have told him what was going to happen. A medieval Midrash even has Moses weeping about what God had told him, and writing these lines in his own tears.¹² However, Simon Patrick, Bishop of Ely, in his A Commentary upon the Fifth Book of Moses, called Deuteronomy, in his note to Chapter 4, says that the verses were “not written at the same time with the rest of the Book,” because of the account of Moses' death and burial, “unless we suppose Moses to have given an account of his own Death and Burial by the Spirit of Prophecy, which is not probable.” So Bishop Patrick calmly offered the possibility that the passage was most likely by Samuel, “who was a Prophet and wrote by Divine Authority, what he found in the Records which were left by Joshua” (Patrick 1700: 678-9).

The importance of maintaining the Mosaic authorship is that it was the supposed guarantee of the truth of the text. Moses received the text directly from God. According to the Westminster Confession of 1658 (a statement of the leading English Protestants), God guaranteed the transmission of His Message to Moses and preserved the Mosaic text perfectly in all transmissions from then on.¹³ A recent review in the New York Times of Harold Bloom's The Book of J states, “Strict religious tradition, of course, states that the Hebrew Pentateuch was given directly by God to Moses. In this sense, any notion that the first five books of the Bible were written and revised by men or women over the centuries is heretical to strict believers, as much biblical scholarship is.”¹⁴

From what appears in various commentaries, the recognition that Moses was not the author of a few lines in Deuteronomy did not constitute much of a problem for believers. They accepted the text as Divine Revelation, the Word of God, given in most part to Moses by God. The recognition of non-Mosaic lines only began to have serious and severe repercussions in the 1650s, in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Isaac La Peyrère, Samuel Fisher, and then Spinoza. All seem to have gotten their view about the lines directly or indirectly from Aben Ezra.

There was also a low-brow rabble-rousing kind of Bible criticism offered by untutored people during the Puritan Revolution. There were Ranters and Levellers and Seekers who rejected the Bible as the work of nasty oppressive priests. These radicals looked for all sorts of reasons to justify rejecting the Bible, and found all of the obvious problems that learned Bible scholars were to dwell upon, including the claim that Moses could not have written about his own death.¹⁵

What has been taken as the first intellectual statement of the questioning of the Mosaic authorship of Scripture is in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, Book III, Chapter xxxiii. Hobbes pointed out that there is no sufficient testimony in Holy Scripture or elsewhere to assure us about who were the writers of the various books. “[F]or the Pentateuch, it is not argument enough that they were written by Moses, because they are called the five Books of Moses” (Hobbes 1947: 247-8). He then pointed out the problem in the last chapter of Deuteronomy about Moses' death. First Hobbes considered the minimal interpretation of this, namely that everything in the Pentateuch was written by Moses except for this chapter. He concluded that this would not work because Genesis 12:6, and Numbers 21:14, refer to events after the time of Moses. From this Hobbes made the sweeping judgment that “It is therefore sufficiently evident, that the five Books of Moses were written after his time, though how long after it be not so manifest” (Hobbes 1947: 248).

Hobbes then settled for a modest revisionist view. “But though Moses did not compile those books entirely, and in the form we have them; yet he wrote all that which he is there said to have written” (Hobbes 1947: 248). So, Hobbes retained the Mosaic authorship of some of Scripture. He applied his analysis to other books of the Bible, and questioned the usual authorship attributions.

What gave the whole text its guarantee and authority? If it has not been revealed to us that the text is God's word, then the acceptance of the text, and the acquiescence to it, is from the authority of the commonwealth. Hobbes made the question a political one for those who have not had a personal supernatural revelation. And for Hobbes it was the sovereign church, the Church of England, that then declared what was Scripture, and what one should do about it. It is obvious in the chapter that Hobbes was concerned to rule out the disruptive force of private interpreters, such as those who had taken over England, and to reinforce the role of the state's political Church as the arbiter, even of the question of what book is Scripture, and who wrote it.

A contemporary, who was probably an acquaintance of Hobbes, presented a more far-reaching examination of the problem of the Mosaic authorship. Isaac La Peyrère, 1596-1677, the secretary of the Prince of Condé, composed a work in 1640-1 justifying his French Messianic expectation that the King of France would rule the world with the Messiah, who would appear at any moment. Most of La Peyrère's book was suppressed, and only known in manuscript until it was published in Amsterdam in 1655, under the title Prae-Adamitate (Men before Adam). La Peyrère was a Calvinist from Bordeaux, probably of Marrano background. In Paris he was part of the Mersenne circle (which Hobbes also belonged to) and was known to many érudits. He traveled on business to the Netherlands, to Scandinavia, Spain, and England. He was friendly with many of Hobbes's associates. In 1654 the recently abdicated Queen Christina of Sweden persuaded La Peyrère to publish his manuscript in Holland, and she probably paid for the printing of it. It quickly appeared in five Latin editions in the Netherlands and Switzerland, an English edition, and a Dutch one. The work was soon banned and burned all over Europe, as scandalous, blasphemous, and Godless, and the author was incarcerated in Belgium until he agreed to apologize personally to the Pope, and to become a Catholic.¹⁶

In order to justify his revised reading of the Bible, La Peyrère questioned whether we have an accurate copy, and whether we can be sure who wrote the document we have. After discussing the passage about Moses' death, plus quite a few other passages that appeared to relate to events after Moses, La Peyrère pointed out that some other books are mentioned in the Bible, which were apparently the sources of the surviving text. He hypothesized that Moses may have kept a diary, and that that was one of the several sources. However, what has come down to us is a compilation of diverse materials, a “heap of copie of copie” (La Peyrère 1656: 204-5). La Peyrère did not question whether the “real” Bible was the Word of God. But he did question whether the confused and mixed-up text that we now have, with thousands of variants in the different manuscripts, was accurate. He learned personally from experts such as Louis Cappel, Andre Rivet, Claude Saumaise, and Isaac Vossius what the problems were in deciding what was the correct text. What was needed was to reconstruct the actual original message from what we now possess.

A further heretical claim of La Peyrère was that the Bible is not the history of mankind, but is just the history of the Jews. All sorts of evidence indicated that there were men before Adam. Some of the evidence was found in the Bible. Who was Cain's wife? The only people mentioned in the Bible up to the point where Cain took a wife were Adam, Eve, and their sons, Abel and Cain. Cain killed Abel, was driven out of Eden, and then married. But married whom? La Peyrère said the wife must have been a pre-Adamite, whose lineage was outside the Adamic framework. (Commentaries of the time take note of the question, and offer the answer that Cain married a sister, who had not been named in the text.¹⁷) Some of the evidence came from ancient history, some from the Voyages of Discovery. According to La Peyrère, mankind has existed for an indefinite length of time, living in a state of nature that was nasty, brutish, and short. (His description is almost the same as Hobbes's.) God, to improve the situation, created Adam, and through him, the Jews, who had a Providential destiny, that was about to be fulfilled with the coming of the Jewish Messiah, who would rule the world with the King of France, and save everyone, Adamite, and pre-Adamite.

La Peyrère made radical suggestions about the Biblical message, but still seemed to insist that there was a most important supernatural message. He said he was only offering a hypothesis that reconciled the text with all of the other known information. One of his last efforts was the preparation of a French Bible with notes, a text that was suppressed before publication. It has a long footnote when Adam is first mentioned in Genesis to the effect that there is a theory that has been declared heretical by the Pope, but which says …, and the evidence for it is. …¹⁸

La Peyrère was not just a nut-case. He was known to many of the leading Bible scholars of the time. His book was very widely read. Spinoza had a copy and used it extensively in his own presentation in the Theological-Political Treatise.¹⁹ Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel knew La Peyrère personally (and became a supporter of his French Messianism).²⁰ He was planning to debate him in Amsterdam, and he wrote an answer which has disappeared. La Peyrère was in Amsterdam for six months in 1655 while his book was being published. The book is dedicated to all the synagogues of the world. He was there during the period when Spinoza seems to have become disillusioned with the views of the Synagogue. Some of La Peyrère's views appear in the charges against Spinoza's associates of the time, Juan de Prado and Daniel Ribera. It is claimed by one of La Peyrère's opponents that he established a sect of “pre-Adamites” in Amsterdam in 1655. Nobody has been able to find who this group was, but it may have included Spinoza and his friends.²¹

From Hobbes to La Peyrère there is an increasingly forceful questioning of whether Moses can have been the author of all of Scripture, and whether we have an accurate text. A further strong challenge appeared in the work of the Quaker Bible scholar, Samuel Fisher, 1605-65. Fisher was one of the few early Quakers who had a university background. He had graduated from Oxford, where he learned Hebrew. Then he became a Baptist minister. In 1654 he became a Quaker. He took the message of the Quakers to Jewish communities in Amsterdam, Germany, and Italy, and held long discussions with Jewish leaders wherever he went.

When he returned to England in 1660, he wrote his 900-page answer to the Puritan contention that Scripture is the Word of God, The Rustic's Alarm to the Rabbies, combining the popular English Bible criticism with his own learned case (Fisher 1660). Christopher Hill has called Fisher “the most radical Bible critic of the time” (Hill 1980: 259-68).

The question of the Mosaic authorship comes up in a marginal note questioning whether Moses could have written the passage about his own death. But for Fisher there are two central questions, one whether the text that we possess is an accurate version of the ancient Hebrew or Greek text, and the other, whether a written document, written sometime in human history, can be the Word of God.

On the first point Fisher brought up two central problems. One was that of whether there is any basis for calling the particular collection of documents that have come down to us “Scripture,” and the other whether these documents have been passed down to us in exact copies of the originals. Scholars knew the history of the Old Testament canon, as reported in Josephus's History of the Jews, and in the Talmud, namely that a rabbinical council, either in Ezra's time, or around 300 b.c., decided which texts were canonical. Fisher challenged the reliability of such a human decision to have determined which texts were revealed ones, and stressed that there were more books available than those now bound in the Bible. Why are only the included books “Scripture”?

Fisher spent an inordinate amount of time on the second point, the transmission problem. The Westminster Confession of 1658 had declared that the text had been transmitted exactly and that God had guaranteed and protected the text. But then what about all of the thousands of variants in different manuscripts? Fisher learned from various Jewish and Christian authorities, including Elias Levita, Louis Cappel, Christian Ravius, and the Buxtorfs, that Hebrew vowel markings did not exist in the original Bible, and were introduced much later. Therefore the text has changed, and we do not possess an exact fixed text of God's Word. None of the manuscripts now existing is a holograph manuscript written by Moses, by any of the Prophets, or by Ezra. The manuscripts we have are copies of copies of copies, made by fallible human beings. And they are not only fallible, they are also people of dubious reliability. The earliest manuscripts were made by stiff-necked Jews who refused to see the Light, and the later ones were made by corrupt Catholic monks. Now what we have is what greedy printers decide is the text. (All of these points can be raised as well about New Testament texts.)

The upshot for Fisher is that one cannot tell whether a given manuscript or book contains the Word of God exact and entire, unless one knows independently what the Word of God is. The Word of God presumably existed before any attempt was made to write it down. It was known before Moses by Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and so forth, none of whom had a copy. It was even known to Moses before he supposedly wrote it down. Fisher rushed further to a form of Quaker universalism. The Word of God can be known anywhere at any time in any language—why should it only be stateable in Hebrew and Greek?²²

Fisher was in Amsterdam for around six months in 1657-8, before he left for Rome and Constantinople to try to convert the Pope and the Sultan. He attended Synagogue services, and spent lots of time trying to convince members of the community of the Quaker message. He was then also translating two pamphlets by Margaret Fell, the mother of the Quakers, into Hebrew, to try to convert the Jews. I have offered evidence elsewhere that Spinoza, after his excommunication, became involved with the Quakers, and that he joined with Samuel Fisher in translating the pamphlets.²³ If this was the case, Fisher and Spinoza could easily have shared their views about the Biblical text. Spinoza, in the Theological-Political Treatise, expressly set forth the thesis that the Word of God is not a physical object. The Word of God would remain and be recognizable even if all physical books disappeared. For Fisher the Word would be recognized by the Spirit or Light within, for Spinoza by reason.

This leads to the last antecedent Biblical theory leading up to Spinoza's, that of the Socinians and rationalists. Spinoza's close friend and doctor, Lodewijk Meyer, published a work shortly before the Theological-Political Treatise on the philosophical reading of the Scripture, in which he advocated the need to employ reason as the judge of what Scripture said and meant (Meyer 1666).²⁴ A view like this had been developing for a century from the skeptical reformer, Sebastian Castellio, and from Faustus Socinus. The latter, whose followers were the Socinians or Unitarians of the seventeenth century, insisted on a literal reading of Scripture, and a rational assessment of what it said. The Socinians' great heresy was to contend that Scripture does not state the doctrine of the Trinity, and that a rational reading of the text denies that Jesus is of the same substance as God the Father. But the Socinians up to Spinoza's time insisted that they recognized Jesus as central to their religion, as the Lamb of God, as God's messenger to man, the most special member of the human race, and that their religion was based on Scripture taken in its most literal sense. It was only at the same time as the Theological-Political Treatise appeared that the Socinian leader, Wiszowaty (Socinus's grandson), offered the most radical view that reason should not only be the measure of one's religious belief, but should be the source of it.²⁵ Spinoza knew Socinians, must have mingled with them at Collegiant gatherings, and he had some of their literature in his library.²⁶

To examine Spinoza's own statement of his views about the Bible in the Theological-Political Treatise, let us start with what he said about the authorship of the text. Chapter viii has the title, “In which it is shown that the Pentateuch and the Books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel and Kings were not written by themselves. The question of their authorship is considered. Was there one author, or several, and who were they.” Spinoza stated that to treat the matter in a logical order, he began with the views of Aben Ezra about the Mosaic authorship. He quoted from Aben Ezra's commentary on Deuteronomy (which appears in the Bomberg Bible, to which Spinoza specifically refers in Chapter ix). Then Spinoza said, “In these few words he [Aben Ezra] gives a clear indication that it was not Moses who wrote the Pentateuch but someone else who lived long after him, and that it was a different book that Moses wrote” (TTP viii.162). Next Spinoza broke down Aben Ezra's case to six points: (1) the preface to Deuteronomy could not have been written by Moses; (2) the Book of Moses must have been much smaller than the Pentateuch; (3) where Moses is talked of in the third person, as in Deuteronomy 31:9, the words “must be those of another writer narrating the deeds and writings of Moses”; (4) Genesis 12:6, about the land of Canaan, must have been written after the death of Moses; (5) Genesis 22:14, about where the Temple was to be built, must be post-Moses, for Moses does not indicate any position as chosen by God, but just foretells that God will sometime choose the place; and (6) in Deuteronomy 3 some texts have been added long after the time of Moses.

Spinoza then added a list of other texts which he contended also could not be by Moses. His list contains many that appear in La Peyrère and in Fisher as well. From texts in Deuteronomy 29 and 31, Spinoza (and La Peyrère) claimed that Moses actually wrote a small book explaining the Mosaic laws, called the Book of the Law of God, to which Joshua later added an account of the covenant by which his contemporaries bound themselves (Joshua 24:25-26). No book now exists that looks like this. “We may therefore conclude that the book of the Law of God which Moses wrote was not the Pentateuch, but a quite different book which the author of the Pentateuch inserted in proper order in his own work, and this conclusion follows on the clearest evidence” (TTP viii.166). On the next page, Spinoza announced that “since there are many passages in the Pentateuch that could not have been written by Moses, it follows that there are no grounds for holding Moses to be the author of the Pentateuch, and that such an opinion is quite contrary to reason” (TTP viii.167). Spinoza then examined the text and offered a theory of how the work could have been put together by a historian post-Moses.

All of this might make Spinoza just a more extreme evaluator of the Biblical text. Aben Ezra had just said that Moses did not write the entire Pentateuch, and gave some texts that he suggested were not by Moses. Various commentators have pointed out that Aben Ezra did not draw any heretical conclusions from this.²⁷ Hobbes extended this and said that Moses should only be considered the author of the texts which are said to be by him. La Peyrère separated the finished text from a possible Mosaic text. Fisher cast more doubts on the authorship. But all of them held in some sense that the text, regardless of how it came to be, should be taken as the Word of God. (Fisher would require that it be recognized as such by the Spirit or Light.) Other commentators who noticed some of the problems cited by these critics, and who shrugged them off by saying Joshua wrote that, and Samuel wrote that, and so forth, were convinced that the entire text was inspired and written by men who were inspired by God. Hence the petty difficulty that Moses could not have written line x did not matter, if the author was also in contact with God.

Hobbes began the next line of Biblical criticism by asking “from whence the Scriptures derive their authority?” It is believed, he said, “on all hands, that the first and original author of them is God.” This is not what is in dispute. One can only know what is God's word if God has revealed this supernaturally. Where this has not occurred, as in the case of most people, then a political authority has to settle this question for people. And so Hobbes, not denying the Divine status of Scripture, lets the Church of England decide what text is Scripture (Hobbes 1947: 245-55).

La Peyrère, in apologizing to the Pope, said he was led to his heresies by his Calvinist upbringing. He had been taught that where there were conflicting views, he was to appeal to his own reason to decide. Since he found Scripture to be a mass of conflicting texts, he felt free to offer his own hypothesis about how the text came to be what it is. He said that he was like Copernicus. He was not changing anything in nature, but just offering a different way of looking at it (La Peyrère 1663).²⁸ In his novel hypothesis, the present Scriptural text was seen as a mess that needed to be reconstructed and deciphered. The messy aspect could be explained by human history, but behind it was a divine message.

Spinoza said, as he began his examination of Scripture, that to avoid confusion, theological prejudice and “the hasty acceptance of human fabrications as divine teachings,” we need the true method of Scriptural interpretation. “Now to put it briefly, I hold that the method of interpreting Scripture is no different from the method of interpreting Nature, and is in fact in complete accord with it.” We should allow “no other principles or data for the interpretation of Scripture and study of its contents except those that can be gathered only from Scripture itself and from a historical study of Scripture” (TTP vii.141). In saying this, Spinoza began a quite different way of examining and evaluating Scriptural texts than his predecessors employed. The literalism and the contextualism led to a completely secular reading of the Bible. For Spinoza, one had to examine and study the language of the Biblical authors: the way the language was used, the circumstances under which the books were written, including the intentions of the authors. This kind of study, as conceived by Spinoza, placed the Scripture clearly inside human history.

Even in this Spinoza was not completely original. As a result of all the discoveries of different kinds of religions all over the planet, and of the myriad varieties of ancient religions, a kind of anthropology of religion began to be developed in the seventeenth century. Its form, pre-Spinoza, as stated at great length by such eminent scholars as Gerard Vossius of Leiden and Amsterdam in his Origins of Gentile Theology, of 1641 (reprinted several times in the seventeenth century, and studied and used by Hugo Grotius, Herbert of Cherbury, Ralph Cudworth, and Isaac Newton), was to account for polytheism as a historical development from an original natural and revealed religion. The ancient Hebrews first presented a natural religion in the form of the several principles of Noah (the Noachide laws), and later, with Moses, presented a revealed religion as well. All other religions, according to Vossius, derive from, and are degenerate forms of, this Ur-religion. Some of the degenerate elements got into later Judaism and Christianity (and account for some of the corruptions in Scripture). Through most careful philological and historical studies, scholars can reconstruct the development of religion from its natural beginning to its many manifestations today. This historical reconstruction places most religious developments in historical human contexts, political, social, economic, military, and so on.

Spinoza went somewhat further, in assessing the first alleged inspired religious teachers, the prophets of ancient Israel. Crucial reasons for this appear in the earlier chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise, in which so-called divine inspiration is analyzed into a form of strictly human manic-depression, and so-called divine history, or Providential history, is analyzed into local political history of the early Hebrews. Their peculiar situation after the escape from Egypt put them into a situation where they were without laws. Moses gave them laws, and called them God's laws to make sure that the early Hebrews would obey them.

The Theological-Political Treatise begins with an examination of what prophecy and prophetic inspiration can mean. Spinoza questioned whether the prophets could have known something different from what can be known by ordinary persons through reason and experience. It could not be mathematical knowledge, or knowledge of empirical facts. As Spinoza examined the matter, he decided that there is no special knowledge that the prophets possessed, but rather that the prophets had a more vivid imagination than ordinary people.

The Cambridge Platonists in England, just before Spinoza, had been attempting to define “divine inspiration” clearly and carefully, so that it could be completely distinguished from “enthusiasm,” which Henry More defined as a belief that one is divinely inspired when one is in fact not so.²⁹ The Quakers, whom the Cambridge Platonists considered the worst kind of enthusiasts, had to try to explain how they could be sure they were expressing the Word of God, and others were not.

Whether Spinoza knew of these discussions (and some evidence suggests he did),³⁰ he contended that the prophets did not offer special knowledge claims that other people could not know by other means, but offered vivid accounts of their imaginings. To understand what prophets were saying and why they were saying it in the way that they did, one had to employ Spinoza's contextualistic method of reading the Bible.

Spinoza claimed that there were some works which were self-explanatory. The concepts employed were clear, the reasoning obvious, so that no more information was needed to understand them. The example offered of such a work was Euclid's Elements. Spinoza declared that the reader did not need to know Greek, did not need to know Euclid's personal autobiography, did not need to know the state of affairs under which he wrote:

Euclid, whose writings are concerned only with things exceedingly simple and perfectly intelligible, is easily made clear by anyone in any language; for in order to grasp his thought and be assured of his true meaning there is no need to have a thorough knowledge of the language in which he wrote. A superficial and rudimentary knowledge is enough. Nor need we enquire into the author's life, pursuits, and character, the language in which he wrote, and for whom and when; nor what happened to his book, nor its different readings, nor how it came to be accepted and by what council. And what we here say of Euclid can be said of all who have written of matters which of their nature are capable of intellectual apprehension.

(TTP vii.154)

In contrast “Scripture does not provide us with definitions of the things of which it speaks” (TTP vii.142). In order for us to figure out what is being said, we have to look into the nature and properties of the language in which the Bible is written. We have to see how the Biblical authors use this language. And we have to find out the circumstances relevant to all of the books of the prophets that have come down to us, including knowledge of the life, character, and pursuits of the author of each book. This includes finding out who each author was, when and for whom he wrote the book, how the book was revised, and who decided that it is sacred.

All of this contextualism could be compatible with traditional orthodoxy if one regarded the Biblical texts as divinely inspired. Spinoza insisted that those who contend that the light of reason is inadequate to interpret Scripture, and that a supernatural light is absolutely essential, cannot explain what this supernatural light is (TTP vii.155). They cannot make clear what this supposed supernatural light is supposed to be. The explanations that they offer are remarkably similar to natural ones, “their explanations are human, the fruit of long thought, and elaborately devised” (TTP vii.155). If the supernatural light is known only to the faithful, then what about the fact that the prophets were also preaching to the unbelievers and the impious? Could the audience have understood what was being said, if they did not have any supernatural light? Spinoza concluded his discussion by saying “those who look to a supernatural light to understand the meaning of the prophets and the apostles are sadly in need of the natural light, and so I can hardly think that such men possess a divine supernatural gift” (TTP vii.155).

Thus, having excluded any supernatural or divine element in the Biblical text, Spinoza's contextualism took on a radically different form than those before and after him who used similar materials to elucidate what they took to be a divinely inspired text. For Spinoza the meaning of what was related in Scripture was to be found, and exhausted, in elucidating the linguistic formulation, the historical context, and the personality of the Biblical author.

In terms of this, Spinoza saw that the central part of the Pentateuch, the receiving and acceptance of the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law by the Jews, was to be understood in terms of the circumstances of the time. The ancient Hebrews had just escaped from Egypt, and from Egyptian law. They were then in a lawless world, a state of nature. Moses fortunately rescued them from that state of affairs by giving them new laws, and making them accept the laws by clothing them in divine terms. Thus the ancient Hebrew theocracy was established. This explains what happened at the great episode at Mount Sinai, and accounts for the Jews setting up a new state under these laws.

On Spinoza's reading, the ceremonial laws of this theocracy can be understood in terms of the conditions of the time, and the beliefs of the time. But these laws are not binding in different times and different conditions. The only universally binding law is the moral law, binding because it is rationally derived rather than historically accepted.

Spinoza's explanation is like that offered by Machiavelli and Hobbes of how pagan religions developed, and gained their authority. The political explanation of religion was being offered in the mid-seventeenth century for all cases other than Judaism and true Christianity. (Reformers explained the rise and power of Roman Catholicism in political terms, and some Catholics did the same for the Reformation.) In 1656, Henry Oldenburg, who was to become Spinoza's most important friend outside of the Netherlands, wrote from Oxford to Adam Boreel, the leader of the Collegiants, the group Spinoza joined after his excommunication in the same year, to tell Boreel that a theory was being offered to the effect that Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet were impostors, political intriguers, who gained power by foisting a new religion on people. (This is, of course, the thesis of the notorious clandestine work, Les Trois Imposteurs, ou l’Esprit de M/ Spinosa, published in the early eighteenth century, but written in the latter part of the seventeenth century.³¹

Oldenburg did not identify who was offering this theory. But he beseeched Boreel to write an answer in order to save religion. Boreel over the next several years wrote an as-yet-unpublished response entitled Jesus Christ Legislator of the Human Race.³²

It seems likely that this project—the largest undertaking in Boreel's career, his answer to unbelievers as well as to Jews and Moslems—would be known to those in the Collegiant movement that he headed, including Spinoza. I think that some of Spinoza's remarks about Jesus in the Theological-Political Treatise make sense as an alternative to Boreel's thesis that Jesus is the universal law-giver.³³

In Chapter iv, Spinoza said that,

With regard to Christ, although he also appears to have laid down laws in God's name, we must maintain that he perceived things truly and adequately; for Christ was not so much the prophet as the mouthpiece of God. It was through the mind of Christ … that God made revelations to mankind just as he once did through angels … Christ was sent to teach not only the Jews but the entire human race … God revealed himself to Christ, or to Christ's mind, directly, and not through words and images as in the case of the prophets. … Christ perceived truly, or understood, what was revealed.

Christ, then, perceived truly and adequately the things revealed to him; so if ever he proclaimed these things as law, he did so because of people's ignorance and obstinacy.

(TTP iv.108-109)

Spinoza insisted that Christ did not introduce any new laws, and even doubted that Christ introduced any ceremonies (TTP v.119).³⁴ He pronounced the divine moral law. And, “He who firmly believes that God, out of the mercy and grace with which He directs all things, forgives men's sins, from the mercy and grace whereby he directs all things, and whose heart is thereby more inspired by love of God, that man verily knows Christ according to the spirit and Christ is in him” (TTP xiv.225).

These, and many other passages about Jesus Christ in Spinoza have provoked much discussion, even learned tomes.³⁵ If Spinoza was supposed to be an atheist, could these express a serious view? If Spinoza had a Jewish upbringing, could he ever have strayed so far as to be a believing Christian? (We know he never joined any Christian organization, though he was buried in the yard of a Christian church.)

Jewish readers often ask me: Why? Who is he trying to kid? Did he have to say such things to please the censor, or the audience? They assume that he could not have been serious or sincere.

I cannot here prove the opposite, but I will suggest that what Spinoza said about Christ makes sense as an alternative to Boreel's view, and as an expression of Socinian and Quaker views about Christ that Spinoza could have accepted without committing himself to any supernatural view. For Spinoza, unlike Boreel, Christ was not a law-giver, nor was he an impostor, but was God's spokesperson. In this he offered a view close to that of the Socinians in Holland of the time, and a Christology like theirs, in making Christ of a different order than Moses and the prophets in relation to God, without attributing any Divine substance or features to Christ. To “know Christ according to the spirit, and to have Christ within oneself” was a Quaker expression, in which anyone, Christian, Jew, Moslem, pagan, could have Christ within themselves. Spinoza's patron, Peter Serrarius, said he was sure that the spirit of Christ was within Rabbi Nathan Shapira of Jerusalem, when the rabbi said that he found the Sermon on the Mount was the fount of all wisdom and the expression of the teaching of our greatest rabbis.³⁶ The Quakers were accused of being non-Christian because of their universalism, and their nonhistorical conception of Christ as the Spirit of God.

Spinoza made it clear that he was not a Christian in many senses in his late correspondence with Oldenburg, when Spinoza said he was willing to accept the historical account in the Gospels except for the Resurrection. Oldenburg told his friend that that tears up Christianity by its roots (Ep 79, 11 February 1676). Spinoza was unimpressed, since for him the essence of Christianity was the golden rule, not the activities of a supernatural being. He, like the Socinians, was willing to accept a superhuman role for Jesus, and like the Quakers saw Christ as the name of the spirit within that made men moral.³⁷

Turning now to the larger picture of Spinoza's view of the Bible, what is original and really significant? In detail, I have suggested Spinoza was reiterating what both orthodox Bible scholars, and radical ones like Hobbes, La Peyrère, and Samuel Fisher, had already said. His startling examples appear in early writers, and did not lead everyone to see that the Bible was just a human document. As I have indicated, Hobbes and La Peyrère said they believed that there was a Divine Message in the Book, but that it might be harder to find than people expected because of the state of the evidence and the state of the text. Fisher believed one could experience the Word of God, and use it as a measure of the texts presented as Scripture.

Spinoza indicated the crucial new step he had taken in his summation of his evaluation of the Bible in Chapter xii of the Theological-Political Treatise. He said, “In the case of both Testaments, the books were not written by express command at one and the same time for all ages” (TTP xii.210). Hobbes, La Peyrère, and Fisher would all agree, as would many orthodox scholars.³⁸ He went on, “They were the fortuitous work of certain men who wrote according to the requirements of their age and of their own particular character,” again a view held by many.

Spinoza began to strike out originally when he next stated that understanding Scripture and the mind of the prophets is “by no means the same thing as to understand the mind of God, that is, to understand truth itself” (TTP xii.210). Understanding Scripture then became a strictly historical enterprise. One had to understand that the books of the Old and New Testaments were selected by groups of men. “But the membership of these councils (both of Pharisees and of Christians) did not consist of prophets, but only of teachers and scholars” (TTP xii.210). Spinoza was willing to put forth a Quakerish sentiment, that these teachers or scholars took the Word of God as their standard, in making their selection. Hence they must have had some idea of the Word of God before they approved the books that went into the canon.

However, and this is all-important, “We have thus shown that it is only in respect of religion—i.e. in respect of the universal divine law—that Scripture can properly be called the Word of God.” The rest is historical, to be understood in terms of human causes, psychological, sociological, political, economic, and so forth. In separating the Message—the Word of God, the Divine Law, and the historical Scriptures—Spinoza made the documents themselves of interest only in human terms, and to be explained in human terms. In this he diverged even from the anti-Scripturalism of the Quakers, who lived and breathed the Bible, and spoke through it. They did not take it as the Word of God, but the Word for them was expressed often within it. For Spinoza, the voice of reason, the Word of God, was expressed in it only in the Divine Law.

Looked at from a different angle, Spinoza totally secularized the Bible as a historical document. He could do this because he had a radically different metaphysics, more radical than that of even his most radical contemporaries, a metaphysics for a world without any supernatural dimension. But what he said as a historical scholar (and he really was not much of one, compared to some of his contemporaries)³⁹ did not imply or prove his naturalist stance. What he said as a historical scholar was interpreted in terms of his historical stance, and became the new Enlightened way of seeing the religious world as a human creation. His immediate successor Father Richard Simon said that he agreed with Spinoza's method but not with his conclusions. Father Simon used inordinate historical researches to try to get to the ur-text, and spawned the industry now known as Higher Criticism. (And perhaps it was Simon's historical and philological details that made Spinoza's claims plausible at the time.) Its practitioners contend that they are still in a supernaturalism of sorts,⁴⁰ seeking in scraps of Dead Sea Scrolls, in Gnostic texts, for God's Message to man. Spinoza was baldly willing to claim that the historical scriptures are some men's messages to man. And the worthwhile messages are those that follow from unfettered, unprejudiced reasoning. This rational secularism based on a naturalistic metaphysics is reinforced by the historical analysis of religious writings, rather than based upon them. And it is this new metaphysics (or revived Greek naturalism) that is Spinoza's great contribution, for better or worse, to the making of the modern mind. One may wonder, as I do, why it was so acceptable to a world of thinkers raised on taking supernaturalism seriously. But that is another long, long story.⁴¹

Notes

1. See Popkin 1990b, and Biderman and Kasher 1990.

2. The best picture of the community and the background of its members appears in Kaplan 1989.

3. Uriel da Costa wrote a response in Portuguese in 1623 stating his views. It was believed that all copies of this work had been destroyed by the Synagogue at the time of his excommunication. However, Prof. H. P. Salomon has discovered a copy, and has published an edition of it as Da Costa 1993.

4. Little is known of Menasseh's training. He was born in La Rochelle, France, raised in Lisbon, turned up in Amsterdam as a teenager, and was teaching in the synagogue school when he was eighteen. He and rabbi Aboab apparently learned much privately from the Cabbalist, Abraham Cohen Herrera, who lived in Amsterdam but played no role in the community. Menasseh published only one work in Hebrew, and there is some question as to whether it was translated for him.

   Morteira was born and raised in the Jewish community in Venice. He left at age thirteen, and went to Paris as secretary to Queen Marie de Medici's doctor, Elijah de Montalto. He was at the Louvre until 1617, when he went to Amsterdam to bury Dr. Montalto, and stayed there.

5. Spinoza, TTP ix.179. All quotations are taken from the translation of Samuel Shirley (Spinoza 1989).

6. See Révah 1964, 1959, 1970-2.

7. There has been a recent discovery of the writings of van den Enden. The texts will be published by Professor Wim Klever of Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He has told me that the texts will show the source of Spinoza's views. The texts postdate Spinoza's excommunication and, Klever tells me, do not deal with Judaism.

8. See Goshen-Gottstein 1989: 34.

9. Zac 1965: 37-9, shows that there is no reason to suspect any heterodoxy in Aben Ezra's views.

10. Some of the answers to Christianity written in Amsterdam specifically direct their attack against claims made by Pablo de Santa Maria.

11. The work says it was perused and attested by the Bishop of Armagh, who was Archbishop Ussher.

12. Amos Funkenstein has pointed out to me that even as far back as the Babylonian Talmud, Baba Bahia, mention is made that Moses could not have written about his own death.

13. Westminster Confession, London 1658, Chapter 1, page 6: “The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the Native Language of the People of GOD of old) and the New Testament in Greek (which at the time of the writing of it was generally known to the Nations) being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and Providence kept pure in all Ages, are therefore Authentical.”

14. Richard Bernstein, in New York Times, October 24, 1990, Section C, page 11. Modern commentaries just take it for granted that Joshua or somebody else wrote the lines about Moses' death and what happened thereafter. See Reider 1937: 342; Driver 1973: 417, 535; and Buttrick 1952-7: 535. The latter gives a full “higher critical” gloss. Deuteronomy 34: 1-12 is a final appendix to the book in narrative form. “Scholars have long agreed that it was taken from a priestly editor's edition of the old historical sources, JE, which perhaps had been expanded by a Deuteronomic writer, presumably the historian responsible for the books of Joshua-II Kings.”

15. See Hill 1980.

16. On La Peyrère, see my book, Popkin 1987a.

17. For instance there is a text by George Hughes, a minister at Plymouth, An Analytical Exposition of the Whole First Book of Moses called Genesis, 1672, where the answer to the question who was Cain's wife is, “It must surely be one of Adam's daughters; many vain conceits there are that she was a twin born with him, that her name was Schave, other Calmana; but the scripture is silent of these, therefore no faith can be on them.”

18. Copies of this, entitled Michel de Marolles, Le Livre de Genese, are in the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale.

19. A quite incomplete list of borrowings appears in Strauss 1965.

20. See Popkin 1984a.

21. See Popkin 1987a for details on these matters.

22. On Fisher, see Popkin 1985.

23. See Popkin 1984c, 1987b.

24. A French translation of this work with an important introduction has recently appeared (Meyer 1988) with introduction and notes by Jacqueline Lagrée and Pierre-François Moreau.

25. See Wiszowaty 1980 (published originally in 1685).

26. The Socinian, Christopher Sand, gave him a copy of his work.

27. See, for instance, the discussion in Zac 1965: 37-9.

28. See Popkin 1987a: 15-16.

29. On this, and the view of the Cambridge Platonists about Spinoza, see Hutton 1984.

30. See Hutton 1984.

31. Oldenburg wrote that, according to this horrendous view:

    … the whole story of the Creation seems to have been composed in order to introduce the Sabbath, and that from motives of merely political prudence. For to what purpose … is the fatiguing labor of so many days assigned to Almighty God, when all things submit to his bidding in a single instant? It seems that that very prudent legislator and ruler, Moses, concocted the whole story on purpose, so that (when he had gained acceptance of it in the minds of his people) one certain day should be set aside on which they should solemnly and publicly worship that invisible Deity; and so that whatever Moses himself should say proceeded from that same Deity they would observe with great humility and reverence. The other problem is that Moses certainly encouraged and excited his people to obey him and to be brave in war by hopes and promises of acquiring rich booty, and ample possessions, and that the man Christ, being more prudent than Moses, enticed his people by the hope of eternal life and happiness though aware that the soul seriously contemplating eternity would scarcely savor what is vile and low. But, Mahommed, cunning in all things, enlisted all men with the good things of this world as well as of the next, and so became their master, and extended the limits of his empire much more widely than did any legislator before or after him. You see what license this critic adopts out of love of reasoning.

    (Oldenburg 1965-86: 89-92)

32. The manuscript, in confused order, is in the Boyle Papers in the Royal Society of England, Volumes 12, 13, and 15. Henry More knew of the text, from a copy that belonged to Francis Van Helmont.

33. See Popkin 1991.

34. Spinoza's view is like that of some of the Judaizing Socinians, who denied that any religious laws had been changed by Jesus' appearance in the first century. Some of these Judaizers, unlike Spinoza, then kept all the Mosaic laws while being “Christians” of sorts.

35. Such as Matheron 1971.

36. See Popkin 1984b.

37. The early Quakers saw themselves as the Second Coming, the second expression of the Spirit of God on earth. See, for instance, William Penn's Visitation to the Jews.

38. For instance, Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, after reading Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise and Richard Simon's Critical History of the Old Testament, said:

    The Question is not, whether the Books of Moses were written by himself, or by others according to his Appointments or Direction. It is not, whether the Writings of Moses were preserved free for all literal mistakes, or varieties of Readings in matters of no great consequence. … But it is a Question of great weight & moment, & whereon very much depends, whether the Books of Moses contain the genuine Writings or only some Abstracts & Abridgements of them. … For then the Certainty of our Faith doth not depend on the Authority of Moses or the Prophets, but on the Credibility of those Persons, who have taken upon them to give out these Abridgements in stead of their Original Writings.

    (Stillingfleet's notes for a Sermon, 1682/3, published in Reedy 1985: 147)

39. Spinoza cited none of the standard commentaries by Christian scholars that were read by almost everyone in the republic of letters. In his library he had grammars and dictionaries by the Christian Hebraists, but not their expositions or explanations of Scripture. The first to write an answer to the Theological-Political Treatise, Regneri à Mansvelt (Mansvelt 1674; written by 1672), lists many experts who worked diligently and carefully on the problems of the Hebrew text but are not mentioned by Spinoza—Drusius, Buxtorf, Fagius, Bochart, Coccocieus, Capell, Selden, Munster, Hottinger, and Scaliger.

40. Consider Bultmann, for example, about what is left of the message when all of the aspects of the text have been demythologized.

41. A version of this paper has also appeared in Force, James and R. H. Popkin, eds., The Books of Nature and Scripture (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994).

Method of Citation

Where references are by author and year of publication, full reference information may be found in the Bibliography.

The following common abbreviations have been used in referring to Spinoza's writings:

CGLH: Compendium of Hebrew Grammar (Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae)

DPP: Descartes's “Principles of Philosophy” (Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, Pars I et II, More Geometrico demonstratae)

E: Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico demonstrata)

Ep: Correspondence (Epistulae)

ST: Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en des zelfs Welstand)

TdIE: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione)

TP: Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus)

TTP: Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus)

References to the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the Political Treatise, and the Theological-Political Treatise are by chapter and, within chapters, by the section numbers introduced in the Bruder edition of Spinoza's works and reproduced in many subsequent editions.

References to the Correspondence are by letter number.

References to Descartes's “Principles of Philosophy” and the Ethics begin with an arabic number denoting the Part, and use the following common abbreviations:

a: Axiom

ap: Appendix

c: Corollary

d: Definition (when not following a Proposition number)

d: Demonstration (when following a Proposition number)

da: Definition of the Affects (located at the end of Ethics Part 3)

ex: Explanation

le: Lemma (located after Ethics 2p13)

p: Proposition

po: Postulate

pr: Preface

s: Scholium (Note)

For example, “E 1p14d,c1” refers to Ethics Part 1, Proposition 14, Demonstration and Corollary 1.

Bibliography

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Buttrick, George Arthur, ed. 1952-7. The Interpreter's Bible. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury.

Da Costa, Uriel. 1993. Examination of Pharisaic Traditions. ed. H. P. Salomon. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Driver, S. C. 1973. “A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Deuteronomy.” In International Critical Commentary, 3rd ed., Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.

Fisher, Samuel. 1660. The Rustick Alarm to the Rabbies. London: Robert Wilson.

Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe. 1989. “Bible et judaisme.” In Le grand siècle et la Bible, ed. J.-R. Armogathe, 33-9. Paris: Beauchesne.

Greenslade, S., ed. 1963. Cambridge History of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hill, Christopher. 1980. The World Turned Upside Down. New York: Penguin.

Hobbes, Thomas. 1947. Leviathan. ed. Oakeshott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hutton, Sarah. 1984. “Reason and Revelation in the Cambridge Platonists and their Reception of Spinoza.” In Spinoza in den Frühzeit seiner religiosen Wirkung, eds. K. Grunder and Schmidt-Biggeman, Wolfenbutteler Studien zur Aufklärung, Vol. 12, 181-200. Heidelberg.

Kaplan, Yosef. 1989. From Christianity to Judaism: The Life of Isaac Orobio de Castro. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

La Peyrère, Isaac. 1656. Men before Adam. London.

1663. Apologie de la Peyrère. Paris.

Lightfoot, John. 1647. The Harmony of the Four Evangelists, Among themselves, and with the Old Testament.

Mansvelt, Regnerus à. 1674. Adversus anonymum theologico-politicum. Amsterdam: Wolfgang.

Matheron, Alexandre.

1971. Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza. Paris: Aubier.

Meyer, Lodewijk. 1666. Philosophia s. scripturae intepres. Eleutheropoli (=Amsterdam).

1988. La philosophie interprète de l’Ecriture Sainte, ed. and trans. Lagrée, J. and Moreau, P.-F. Paris: Intertextes éditeur.

Oldenburg, Henry. 1965-86. The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. and trans. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall. 13 Vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, London: Mansell, Taylor, and Francis.

Patrick, Simon. 1700. A Commentary upon the Fifth Book of Moses, called Deuteronomy. London.

Popkin, Richard H.

1984a. “Menasseh ben Israel and La Peyrère.” Studia Rosenthaliana 18: 12-20.

1984b. “Rabbi Nathan Shapira's Visit to Amsterdam.” In Dutch Jewish History, ed. Michman, 185-205. Jerusalem: Tel-Aviv University.

1984c. “Spinoza's Relations with the Quakers.” Quaker History 73: 14-28.

1985. “Spinoza and Samuel Fisher.” Philosophia 15: 219-36.

1987a. Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work and Influence. Leiden: Brill.

1987b. Spinoza's Earliest Publication? The Hebrew Translation of Margaret Fell's Loving Salutation. Assen: Van Gorcum.

1990b. “Was Spinoza a Marrano of Reason?” Philosophia (Israel) 20: 243-6.

1991. “Spinoza and The Three Impostors.” In Spinoza: Issues and Directions, eds. Edwin Curley and Pierre-François Moreau, 347-58. Leiden: Brill.

Reedy, Gerard. 1985. The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Reider, Joseph. 1937. Deuteronomy with Commentary. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America.

Révah, I. S. 1959. Spinoza et le docteur Juan de Prado. The Hague: Moputon.

1964. “Aux origines de la rupture spinozienne: nouveaux documents sur l’incroyance dans la communauté judéo-portugaise d’Amsterdam à l’époque de l’excommunication de Spinoza.” Revue des Etudes Juives 123: 359-431.

Richardson, John. 1655. Choice Observations and Explanation upon the Old Testament. London.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1989. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ed. and trans. Samuel Shirley. Leiden: Brill.

Strauss, Leo. 1965. Spinoza's Critique of Religion, ed. and trans. E. M. Sinclair. New York: Schocken Books.

Wiszowaty, Andrew, Jr. 1980. “Rational Religion, or a Tract Concerning the Judgment of Reason to be used even in Theological and Religious Controversies.” In The Polish Brethren. Harvard Theological Studies XXX, Document XXXIV, ed. George H. Williams, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Zac, Sylvain. 1965. Spinoza et l’interprétation de l’écriture. Paris: PUF.