Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710 investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focuses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, language, and the historical context in which it originated. Jetze Touber expertly charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism to determine if Spinoza's work on the Bible had bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should handle Scripture. Spinoza has received considerable attention both in and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly during the past decades. So has that of fellow 'radicals' (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, and enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. Touber counteracts this perspective and considers how the Dutch Republic used biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. In doing so, Touber takes into account the highly neglected area of the Dutch Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The study concludes that Spinoza--rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity--acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly at all times, on all levels.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710 investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focuses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, language, and the historical context in which it originated. Jetze Touber expertly charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism to determine if Spinoza's work on the Bible had bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should handle Scripture. Spinoza has received considerable attention both in and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly during the past decades. So has that of fellow 'radicals' (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, and enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. Touber counteracts this perspective and considers how the Dutch Republic used biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. In doing so, Touber takes into account the highly neglected area of the Dutch Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The study concludes that Spinoza—rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity—acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly at all times, on all levels.

In Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy, Samuel L. Boyd offers a new reading of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. Using recent insights on the rhetoric of Neo-Assyrian politics and its ideology of governance as well as advances in biblical studies, Boyd shows how the Tower of Babel was not originally about a tower, Babylon, or the advent of multilingualism, at least in the earliest phases of the history and literary context of the story. Rather, the narrative was a critique against the Assyrian empire using themes of human overreach found in many places in Genesis 1-11. Boyd clarifies how idioms of Assyrian governance could have found their way into the biblical text, and how the Hebrew of Genesis 11:1-9 itself leads to a different translation of the passage than found in versions of the Bible, one that does not involve language. This new reading sheds light on how the story became about language. Boyd argues that this new understanding of Babel also illuminates aspects of the call of Abram when the Tower of Babel is interpreted as a story about something other than the origin of multilingualism. Finally, he frames the historical-critical research on the biblical passage and its reception in ancient Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources with the uses of the Tower of Babel in modern politics of language and nationalism. He demonstrates how and why Genesis 11:1-9 has become so useful, in often detrimental ways, to the modern nation-state. Boyd explores this intellectual history of the passage into current events in the twenty-first century and offers perspectives on how a new reading of the Tower of Babel can speak to the current cultural and political moment and offer correctives on the uses and abuses of the Bible in the public sphere.

The Emancipation of Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1590-1670 argues that the application of tools, developed in the study of ancient Greek and Latin authors, to the Bible was aimed at stabilizing the biblical text but had the unintentional effect that the text grew more and more unstable. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) capitalized on this tradition in his notorious Theological-political Treatise (1670). However, the foundations on which his radical biblical scholarship is built were laid by Reformed philologists who started from the hermeneutical assumption that philology was the servant of reformed dogma. On the basis of this principle, they pushed biblical scholarship to the centre of historical studies during the first half of the seventeenth century. Dirk van Miert shows how Jacob Arminius, Franciscus Gomarus, the translators and revisers of the States' Translation, Daniel Heinsius, Hugo Grotius, Claude Saumaise, Isaac de La Peyrère, and Isaac Vossius all drew on techniques developed by classical scholars of Renaissance humanism, notably Joseph Scaliger, who devoted themselves to the study of manuscripts, (oriental) languages, and ancient history. Van Miert assesses and compares the accomplishments of these scholars in textual criticism, the analysis of languages, and the reconstruction of political and cultural historical contexts, highlighting that their methods were closely linked.

This collection of essays treats a topic that has scarcely been approached in the literature on Hebrew and Hebraism in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, Christians, especially Protestants, studied the Mishnah alongside a host of Jewish commentaries in order to reconstruct Jewish culture, history, and ritual, shedding new light on the world of the Old and New Testaments. Their work was also inextricably dependent upon the vigorous Mishnaic studies of early modern Jewish communities. Both traditions, in a sense, culminated in the monumental production in six volumes of an edition and Latin translation of the Mishnah published by Guilielmus Surenhusius in Amsterdam between 1698 and 1703. Surenhusius gathered up more than a century's worth of Mishnaic studies by scholars from England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the commentaries of Maimonides and Obadiah of Bertinoro (c. 1455-c.1515), but this edition was also born out of the unique milieu of Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century, a place which offered possibilities for cross-cultural interactions between Jews and Christians. With Surenhusius's great volumes as an end point, the essays presented here discuss for the first time the multiple ways in which the canonical text of Jewish law, the Mishnah (c.200 CE), was studied by a variety of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, in early modern Europe. They tell the story of how the Mishnah generated an encounter between different cultures, faiths, and confessions that would prove to be enduringly influential for centuries to come.

This volume explores the relevance of decline within the republican tradition. While scholarship on republicanism thrives, the idea of decline, which has been prominent in republican theory since antiquity, has received relatively little attention. The essays in this volume take a broad cultural perspective and study a wide variety of authors and (con)texts to situate decline among the key concepts in the history of republicanism. Most contributions focus on the Dutch Republic during the Age of Enlightenment and Revolutions, the area of expertise of Wyger Velema, to whom this volume is dedicated. Other case studies include early modern Spain and Venice, the German Enlightenment, and the Weimar Republic. Contributors are: Remieg Aerts, Hans Erich Bödeker, Wiep van Bunge, Lisa Kattenberg, Wessel Krul, Matthijs Lok, Alessandro Metlica, Ida Nijenhuis, Eleá de la Porte, Jan Rotmans, Niek van Sas, Freya Sierhuis, and Lina Weber.

A biography of the boldest and most unsettling of the early modern philosophers, Spinoza, which examines the man's life, relationships, writings, and career, while also forcing us to rethink how we previously understood Spinoza's reception in his own time and in the years following his death. The boldest and most unsettling of the major early modern philosophers, Spinoza, had a much greater, if often concealed, impact on the international intellectual scene and on the early Enlightenment than philosophers, historians, and political theorists have conventionally tended to recognize. Europe-wide efforts to prevent the reading public and university students learning about Spinoza, the man and his work, in the years immediately after his death in 1677, dominated much of his early reception owing to the revolutionary implications of his thought for philosophy, religion, practical ethics and lifestyle, Bible criticism, and political theory. Nevertheless, contrary to what has sometimes been maintained, his general impact was immediate, very widespread, and profound. One of the main objectives of the book is to show how early and how deeply Leibniz, Bayle, Arnauld, Henry More, Anne Conway, Richard Baxter, Robert Boyle, Henry Oldenburg, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Richard Simon, and Nicholas Steno, among many others, were affected by and led to wrestle with his principal ideas. There have been surprisingly few biographies of Spinoza, given his fundamental importance in intellectual history and history of philosophy, Bible criticism, and political thought. Jonathan I. Israel has written a biography which provides more detail and context about Spinoza's life, family, writings, circle of friends, highly unusual career and networking, and early reception than its predecessors. Weaving the circumstances of his life and thought into a detailed biography has also led to several notable instances of nuancing or revising our notions of how to interpret certain of his assertions and philosophical claims, and how to understand the complex international reaction to his work during his life-time and in the years immediately following his death.