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Spinoza and Biblical

Philology in the Dutch
Republic, 1660–1710
J E T Z E T OU B E R
1
1
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For Lieven and Maria

Acknowledgements
This book has benefited from the advice and assistance of a great many people.
First of all I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to the members of the
so-called ‘Bible Club’, a regular item in my agenda for years, which was always
something to look forward to: Dirk van Miert, who has been a friend as well as
a source of inspiration, Henk Nellen, a tirelessly helpful and helpfully critical
colleague, and Piet Steenbakkers, who has taught me everything I have been
capable of grasping in Spinoza’s work and in Spinoza scholarship. I also want to
thank the following people whose contributions were essential, whom I list
in order of the alphabet, not importance: Klaas van Berkel, Rachel Boertjens,
Wiep van Bunge, Frank Daudeij, Benjamin Fisher, Albert Gootjes, Trudelien
van ’t Hof, Henri Krop, Wijnand Mijnhardt, Eric Schliesser, Jo Spaans, Jeroen
van de Ven, Theo Verbeek, Paul Ziche, and Irene Zwiep. Indispensable editorial
services have been provided by Jim Gibbon and Mark Rogers. The Department
of Philosophy, Utrecht University, hosting the Spinoza-part of the project, has
felt like a second home, and the Huygens ING, nowadays in Amsterdam, where
the other half of the project had its base, was a welcome partner institution. The
project would not have been possible without the generous funding by NWO
(the Dutch Organisation for Research), and without facilities provided by the
Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and Humanities (Utrecht). I
dedicate this book to the two people whose births coincided with its embryonic
stages.
Contents
List of Illustrations xiii

List of Abbreviations xv
A Note about Proper Names xvii
Introduction: Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic 1

Early Modern Biblical Philology 2
Historical Background 5
Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism 6
Criticism Philosophical and Philological 8
The Bible in the Dutch Reformed Church 12
Concepts and Method 17
Biblical Philology18
Scripturarianism20
Sources: Treatises, Pamphlets, Minutes24
This Book 26
1. Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism 30
1.1. Contours of Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism 31
The Philology of a Philosopher 32
Bible Critics around Spinoza 36
1.2. Background to Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism 40
Jewish Youth 41
Reformed Criticism 46
1.3. Content of Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism 52
Spinoza’s Systematic Theology 53
Spinoza’s Philological Criticism 59
Spinoza’s Politics 71
1.4. Conclusion 74
2. Responses to Spinoza: Burman to Le Clerc 76
2.1. The scripturarii around Alting 78
2.2. The Scripturarian Melchior 87
Melchior’s Systematic Theology 88
Melchior’s Philological Criticism 89
2.3. The Cartesian Van Mansveld 93
Van Mansveld’s Systematic Theology 96
Van Mansveld’s Philological Criticism 98
2.4. The Collegiant Kuyper 103
x Contents
Kuyper’s Systematic Theology 105

Kuyper’s Philological Criticism 106
2.5. Philosophy and Philology Separated, and Reunited 111
A New Phase: Simon and Le Clerc 116
Le Clerc’s Systematic Theology 118
Le Clerc’s Philological Criticism 120
2.6. Conclusion 121
3. Biblical History and Antiquarianism 124
3.1. Biblical History and Antiquarianism 126
The Rise of Biblical Antiquarianism 126
Antiquarian Controversy 129
3.2. Religious History of the Near East 134
Spinoza’s Religious History 135
Jews and Egyptians 136
Urim and Thummim: Spencer 138
Urim and Thummim: Braun 142
3.3. Temples in Text and Architecture 145
The Temple(s) of Solomon and Ezekiel 147
Spinozist Support for Willem Goeree 153
Lay Scholarship and the Spectre of Spinozism 156
3.4. Biblical Scholarship in Social Intercourse 158
Almeloveen’s Scholarly Network 159
Beverland’s Circle and Biblical Erotomania 163
Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism Mediated 168
The Circle of Beverland: Libertinism and Conformism 171
3.5. Conclusion 175
4. The Bible in the Political Fabric of the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710 177
4.1. Theological Polemics and Political Polarization 178
4.2. Scripture Walled by Dogma 183
Spinoza and the States’ Translation 183
Strengthening the Walls of Dogma 188
4.3. Church and State in Utrecht, 1660s 191
Benefices and the Public Church 192
The Dogmatist Response to Van Velthuysen 198
Burman on Secular and Ecclesiastical Governance 203
4.4. Church and Scripture in Friesland, 1680s 207
Theology and the Bible in Zevenwouden 208
Anti-Scripturarian Activism in Zevenwouden 212
4.5. The Public Church Disunited: Van Leenhof 216
Coccejan-Turned-Spinozist: Van Leenhof 217
Heaven on Earth: Zwolle after 1700 222
4.6. Conclusion 225
Contents xi
5. The Sabbath: Biblical Scholarship and Ecclesiastical Discipline 227

5.1. The Fourth Commandment and Sunday Rest 228
The Fourth Commandment: Moral or Ceremonial? 228
Spinoza and Other Controversial Exegetes on the Fourth
Commandment231
5.2. Sabbath and Sunday Rest in the Dutch Republic
before Spinoza 234
The First Disagreement in the Wake of the Synod of
Dordrecht235
The Sabbath in the 1650s: Leiden vs Utrecht 239
The Sabbath in the 1660s: Burman vs Essenius in Utrecht 243
5.3. Egyptian Sabbath and Roman Sunday 249
Bekker: Sunday Rest in Imperial Rome 250
Sabbaths Jewish and Egyptian 254
Spencer’s Followers in the Republic 259
Stretching the Limits of Reformed Exegesis 262
5.4. Conclusion 264
Conclusion: The Bible Human and Divine 266
Reformed Unity 267
Scripturarian Scholarship 268
Radical Criticism 270
Politics of Biblical Scholarship 272
Reformed Unity Renewed 274
Bibliography 275
1. Manuscript and Archival Sources 275
2. Printed Sources (Written before 1800) 276
3. Secondary Literature (Written after 1800) 283
General Index 301
Index Locorum Biblicorum 313
List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Šelomoh ben Yiẕḥaq, ‘Nevi'im aharonim’ (ca. 1300); courtesy of the
Athenaeumbibliotheek, Deventer, call. nr AB ms. 74 A 5 KL. 81
Figure 2. Jacobus Alting, Opera omnia, ed. Balthasar Bekker
(Amsterdam: G. Borst, 1685–1687), V, 382; courtesy of Utrecht
University, Special Collections, call. nr F FOL 199. 83
Figure 3. Johannes Coccejus, De prophetie van Ezechiel, trans. J. H. Coccejus
(Amsterdam, 1691/2); courtesy of Amsterdam University Library,
Special Collections, call nr OTM: O 62-578. 148
Figure 4. Willem Goeree, Voor-bereidselen tot de bybelsche wysheid, en gebruik
der heilige en kerklijke historien (Amsterdam, 1690), II,
1604–1605; courtesy of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library
of the Netherlands), Special Collections, call nr KW 495 A 4. 151
Figure 5. Willem Goeree, Voor-bereidselen tot de bybelsche wysheid, en gebruik
der heilige en kerklijke historien (Amsterdam, 1690), II,
1536–1537; courtesy of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library
of the Netherlands), Special Collections, call nr KW 495 A 4. 152
Figure 6. Chest in which the Autographon of the States’ Translation were kept;
courtesy of Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, obj. nr SPKK v00039. 187
List of Abbreviations
AB Athenaeumbibliotheek (Deventer)
BLGNP Biografisch Lexicon voor de Geschiedenis van het Nederlandse
Protestantisme, 6 vols (Kampen: Kok, 1983–2005)
GA Groninger Archieven (Groningen)
HCO Historisch Centrum Overijssel (Zwolle)
HUA Het Utrechts Archief (Utrecht)
KB Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague)
KJV King James Version (1611)
NHA Noord-Hollands Archief (Haarlem)
NL-DvHCO Historisch Centrum Overijssel, Deventer branch (Deventer)
NNBW Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek (Leiden: Sijthoff,
1911–1937)
NWO Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
SA Stadsarchief (Amsterdam)
TTP Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (Hamburg
[i.e. Amsterdam]: H. Künraht [i.e. J. Rieuwertsz.]: 1670)
UL University Library, Leiden University (Leiden)
UU University Library, Utrecht University (Utrecht)
UvA University Library, University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam)
ZA Zeeuws Archief (Middelburg)
A Note about Proper Names
Early modern proper names come in many variants. In general, I have adopted
the modern, vernacular version of proper names (Frans Burman, not Franciscus
Burmannus). If that version is unknown or ambiguous, I have used the Latin
variant instead (Johannes Georgius Graevius, not Johann Georg Grew or Greffe).
In general, for Dutch names I have followed the Biografisch Portaal, choosing
the Dutch variant if several are listed (Johannes Braun, not Jean Brun).1 At the
first mention of proper names I have added dates of birth and death, if known.
1 http://www.biografischportaal.nl.
Introduction:
Spinoza and Biblical Philology in
the Dutch Republic
In 1712 Johannes Meier (1651–1725), professor of Oriental languages in
Harderwijk, wrote to Gijsbert Cuper (1644–1716), a renowned scholar in
Deventer.1 Meier apologized for the delay in responding to Cuper’s earlier
letters: he had been absorbed in the study of the biblical Temple of Solomon.
He complained that:
while contemplating this magnificent building, the many halls and spaces, I have
been taken up for two months by so many complications, that up to this day I have not
been able to respond. […] What we find in Holy Writ about the Temple is twisted
and difficult, especially in those two chapters I Kings 6 and 7, as well as Ezekiel 40,
41, and 42, and there are hardly any interpreters to be found who agree on it with
one mind and one explanation.2
Five years earlier, Meier had published an academic dissertation on the prophet
Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple.3 In it he responded to all the interpreters who
disagreed among themselves, insofar as they touched upon the Temple vision
in Ezekiel 40–48. Before addressing such matters of detail, however, Meier
had to contend with the criticism of one thinker who had questioned the
authenticity of the book of Ezekiel in the first place. This was Benedict de
Spinoza (1632–1677), who had drawn upon a Talmudic tradition to argue that
1 For Johannes Meier: J. Nat, ‘Meier (Johannes)’, in NNBW, IX, c. 663; for Cuper and his standing
in international scholarly networks, see A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community
in the Republic of Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) 56–9; B. Chen, ‘Politics and
Letters: Gisbert Cuper as a Servant of Two Republics’, in M. Keblusek and B. Noldus, eds, Double
Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2011) 71–93.
2 ‘istius magnificae Aedis, Atriorum & conclavium plurimorum contemplatione in tot tricas
per duos fere menses conjectus sum, ut in hunc diem responsum diferre coactus fuerim, […]
Contorta & difficilia sunt, quae reperiuntur in Sacro Codice de Templo, praesertim ista duo capita
1. Reg. 6 & 7. nec non Ezech. 40. 41. et 42. et vix ulli dantur interpretes, qui de eo una mente atque
oratione consentiant.’ Johannes Meier to Gisbert Cuper, 13 October 1712, KB ms. 72 G 18. All
translations in this book are mine, unless stated otherwise.
3 Johannes Meier, Dissertatio Theologica qua Propheticas Visiones Ezechielis De Templo, Urbe, &
Terrae Israelis distributione (...) olim implendas esse (...) demonstratur (Harderwijk: P. Sas, 1707).
2 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710
rabbis had come close to discarding the book of Ezekiel, considering it

irreconcilable with Mosaic law. Spinoza had even suggested that during a secret
meeting a certain Hananiah had modified the text of Ezekiel’s prophecy, so as
to save it for the canon.4 Meier devoted much of his introduction to defending
the authenticity of the prophetic text from Spinoza’s criticism.
It may seem surprising that a philosopher, famed for his geometrical system
that rationally proves the unity of all and the prudence of doing good, would be
challenged on account of his biblical philology in an unprepossessing theological
dissertation. Yet this was exactly one of the major responses prompted by Spinoza’s
biblical criticism, enshrined in his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), as the
present book sets out to argue. This book discusses biblical philology as prac-
tised by Spinoza, as well as by Reformed philosophers, theologians, and classi-
cists in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. It concentrates not so
much on the philosophical criticism of theological concepts, but rather on the
way Spinoza and his contemporaries worked with the editorial, linguistic, and
historical aspects of biblical texts. It aspires to enrich Spinoza scholarship by
showing that a much broader segment of Dutch society was affected by the
philosopher’s biblical criticism than is usually accounted for—and at the same
time that such criticism was less of a break with the past than often assumed.
EARLY MODERN BIBLICAL PHILOLO GY
Spinoza employed philology, including textual criticism, linguistic knowledge,

and historical contextualization, to situate the biblical texts in the past that had
produced them. Philological method goes back to antiquity, but in Western
Europe the period when philology manifested itself as a ground-breaking intel-
lectual technique was the Renaissance. A landmark in the introduction of
philological source criticism was Lorenzo Valla’s (1407–1457) exposure of
the Donation of Constantine as a forgery. This ‘charter of the papal state’ sup-
posedly ratified the donation of swaths of land in central Italy by Emperor
Constantine the Great to Pope Silvester I. Valla pointed out (in 1440, but his
account was first published in 1517) that its linguistic style and several historical
particulars belied its authenticity, indicating medieval origins.5 A broader
4 Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (Hamburg [i.e. Amsterdam]: H. Künraht

[i.e. J. Rieuwertsz.]: 1670) 136 [henceforth: TTP]. The Tractatus theologico-politicus was printed
five times in the seventeenth century, the successive printings being labelled T.1–T.5. The differ-
ences are negligible. Throughout this book I have used the T.2 printing (probably 1672). See
P. M. L. Steenbakkers, ‘The Text of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’, in Y. Y. Melamed
and M. A. Rosenthal, eds, Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise: A Critical Guide (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010) 29–40 (33).
5 S. Pollock, ‘Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World’, Critical Inquiry 35
(2009) 931–61 (936–8); C. M. Pyle, ‘Bridging the Gap: A Different View of Renaissance Humanism
Introduction 3
philological project consisted of Valla’s annotations to the New Testament,

with possibly far-reaching consequences for the authenticity of many biblical
passages. Valla’s annotations were published in 1505 by Erasmus (ca. 1467–1536),
who subsequently set out to assess the text of the New Testament critically
himself. This resulted in his annotated Novum Instrumentum (1516), a new
edition of the Greek text of the New Testament, a translation in Latin, and
annotations elucidating editorial decisions, linguistic idiom, and historical
context.6
With Erasmus’s critical edition of the New Testament we come to the
heart of this book: the application of philological techniques to make sense
of texts that record sacred persons, utterances, and events. As the sixteenth
century progressed, the unity of Latin Christianity broke down irreversibly.
In Northern Europe, Reformed churches urged a renewal of religion by
returning to Scripture as the true source of salvation, penetrating beyond the
exegetical sediment that had covered it in the Middle Ages. This was coupled
with the humanist desire to revisit the biblical texts in their source languages.
The Reformed churches—particularly those of a Calvinist stamp—married
piety with philology and set out to reconstruct the authentic Sacred Pages, and
to translate them in vernacular languages and thus to make them available to
all individual Christians.7
Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new standard
editions and translations of the Old and New Testaments appeared in all
Calvinist areas.8 At the same time, biblical scholarship exposed problems
that seemed impossible to resolve: apparent interpolations in the biblical texts,
unique Hebrew terms and a ‘Hebraizing’ Greek, inconsistent chronology,
and Science’, in R. Bod et al., eds, The Making of the Humanities, I, Early Modern Europe
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010) 39–57 (46–50); R. Bod, A New History of the
Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013) 31–6, 146–9.
6 H. J. de Jonge, De bestudering van het Nieuwe Testament aan de Noordnederlandse universitei-
ten en het Remonstrants Seminarie van 1575 tot 1700 (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandse Uitgevers
Maatschappij, 1980) 39–40; H. J. de Jonge, Van Erasmus tot Reimarus. Ontwikkelingen in de bijbel-
wetenschap van 1500 tot 1800 (Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1991) 6–8; A. K. Jenkins and
P. Preston, Biblical Scholarship and the Church: A Sixteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007) 36–52.
7 S. Ozment, ‘Humanism, Scholasticism, and the Intellectual Origins of the Reformation’, in
F. Forrester Church and T. George, eds, Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History (Leiden:
Brill, 1979) 133–49; L. Spitz, ‘Humanism and the Protestant Reformation’, in A. Rabil Jr, ed.,
Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, III, Humanism and the Disciplines
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) 381–411; see E. Rummel, The
Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000) 3–4, 9–49, for valuable qualifications regarding the supposed mutual reinforcement of
humanism and reformation.
8 S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, III, The West from the Reformation
to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963) 48–55, 94–174, 339–60;
J. Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) 1–25.
c ontradictory passages. In the confessional struggles that followed the consoli-

dation of rival churches in Europe—the Catholic Church in its various national
branches, and the Lutheran, Anglican, and Calvinist churches—contestants
seized upon the problems of biblical scholarship that most embarrassed their
opponents. Protestants decried Catholics for using a corrupted Bible, the
Vulgate, claiming that their own Hebrew and Greek sources were closer to
the original. Catholics dismissed the Hebrew Old Testament, claiming that the
Greek Septuagint version derived from a manuscript nearer to the original.9
Biblical scholarship that aimed to renew authentic Scripture was thus always
political, entangled with interconfessional polemics.
From around the middle of the seventeenth century, in what seems like a
flood of criticism, several authors picked up these irresolvable issues of biblical
scholarship and instrumentalized them for their own, non-ecclesiastical pur-
poses. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) employed the results of philology in his
biblical criticism, fully integrating theology with his political theory centred
upon undivided sovereignty. Isaac de La Peyrère (1596–1676) seized upon
biblical ambiguities to make the case that the human race had a prehistory that
antedated the creation of Adam and Eve, and he qualified the divine election
of the Jews (even though in another sense he accorded them a privileged status
in his eschatology). And Spinoza—Spinoza deconstructed all certainties con-
cerning the authorship and the integrity of the biblical texts, leaving the reader
with a bare minimum of propositions that could be said to be undeniably
biblical as well as divine.10 As various historians have observed, by the end of the
seventeenth century the destructive potential of philology for the usefulness of
the Bible threatened to overwhelm well-intentioned clergy in Protestant Europe.11
Whereas philology had its roots in the Renaissance and the Reformation,
nevertheless the mid-seventeenth century did mark a watershed in the status of
the Bible in Christian Europe.12
9 S. Mandelbrote, ‘Isaac Vossius and the Septuagint’, in E. Jorink and D. van Miert, Isaac
Vossius (1618–1689) between Science and Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 85–117.
10 L. Diestel, Geschichte des Alten Testamentes in der christlichen Kirche (Jena: Mauke, 1869)
231–554; H. Graf Reventlow, Bibelautorität und Geist der Moderne. Die Bedeutung des
Bibelverständnisses für der geistesgeschichtliche und politische Entwicklung in England von der
Reformation bis zur Aufklärung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980) 328–69; A. Grafton,
Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) 204–13; R. H. Popkin, ‘Spinoza and Bible Scholarship’, in
D. Garrett, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996) 383–407; S. M. Nadler, ‘The Bible Hermeneutics of Baruch de Spinoza’, in M. Sæbø, ed.,
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, II, From the Renaissance to the
Enlightenment (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008) 827–36; P. Gibert, L’invention critique
de la Bible: XVe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2010) 94–127.
11 Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, 31–50; M. C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise
of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 3–26.
12 D. Levitin, ‘From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism, and
Christianity in European Historiography from Reformation to “Enlightenment”’, The Historical
Journal 55 (2012) 1117–61.
Introduction 5
The effect of biblical philology on church and society in the Dutch Republic
in the second half of the seventeenth century, which saw the publication of
Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, is the subject of this book. It thereby
seeks to enhance our appreciation of the efficacy of Spinoza’s biblical criticism
in his own time. Spinoza acquired his reputation as a philosopher for his
rationalism, plain and abstract, his system devised without reference to any
external authority. Yet it is important to realize that one major aspect of his
contribution to intellectual history, his critique of the Religion of the Book,
involved engagement with the technical minutiae of biblical philology. Dirk
van Miert has meticulously reconstructed how ‘biblical philology’, a combination
of textual criticism, language studies, and historical contextualization, became
both fashionable and potentially problematic in the Dutch Republic from the
late sixteenth century onwards.13 Much like his predecessors, Spinoza employed
philological techniques to question the current relevance of source texts,
embedding them in the historical circumstances that had produced, transmit-
ted, and received them. Van Miert has evoked ‘the perfect atmosphere for the
emancipation of biblical philology’ in the decades running from 1640 to 1670.14
True, biblical philology continued to serve the confessional churches as an
integral part of the education of the ecclesiastical elite, in preparation for their
duties in society. But it also increasingly served outsiders who used it to
confront the churches head on.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
This book argues that one major area to be impacted by Spinoza’s historical
deconstruction of Scripture, unduly disregarded by modern historiography,
was the practice of biblical philology among the Reformed Dutch. We investi-
gate biblical philology as an interface where Spinoza’s biblical criticism touched
the scriptural foundations of the Dutch Public Church. Both Spinoza’s biblical
criticism and Dutch Reformed culture have been the subject of massive schol-
arship. A sketch of themes pertinent to our study of philological scholarship
and biblical criticism, as emerging from historiography, lays out a rough map
of the terrain to be covered. First, we briefly encounter Spinoza’s Tractatus
theologico-politicus, his main work of biblical criticism. We then review current
assessments of the respective contributions of philosophy and philology to
seventeenth-century biblical criticism. Finally, we consider the problematic
13 D. van Miert, The Emancipation of Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic (1590–1670)
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For my use of the term ‘philology’ in this book, see sec-
tion ‘Concepts and Method’: ‘Biblical Philology’.
14 Van Miert, The Emancipation of Biblical Philology, ‘The Emancipation of Biblical Philology
(1590–1670)’: ‘Fashioning Biblical Philology’.
status of the Bible in the Dutch Reformed Church, and the way Reformed
scholars operated philology to confront Scripture. In this way the scope broad-
ens, from the work of one philosopher, to the scholarly habits prevailing in
the Public Church of the confessionalized Dutch Republic. We will come to
acknowledge both the importance of philology for understanding the fate of
the Bible in the Republic, and the underexposure of philology in current
historiography.
Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism
The Tractatus theologico-politicus is Spinoza’s most important work of biblical

criticism, and it contains the philosopher’s most elaborate discussion of religion
(as opposed to God).15 In it, Spinoza radically re-interprets concepts central to
Jewish and Christian religious discourse, such as prophecy, miracle, divine law,
ceremonies, and the Word of God itself.16 The consternation it caused is sug-
gested by the words of Jonathan Israel, who has traced the wide and variegated
impact of Spinoza’s works on intellectual culture across Europe: the Tractatus
was ‘the most analyzed, refuted, and—what counts most—obsessively pored
over, wrestled with, and scrutinized text of the era 1670–1820’.17 In this study we
delimit the chronological and geographical scope for appraising the Tractatus’s
significance to the Dutch Republic in the period 1660–1710—that is, from the
years immediately preceding its appearance, up to a generation-and-a-half
after Spinoza’s death.
Without a doubt Spinoza kicked up dust with his sober appraisal of the Bible.
Steven Nadler has listed a number of claims made in the Tractatus theologico-
politicus that must have been shocking when it appeared: Spinoza asserted that
acceptance of the reality of miracles was due to sheer ignorance of natural
causality; he considered clerical authority a product of the hopes and fears
of the uneducated masses; he reinterpreted the divine election of the Jewish
people as an image created by political propaganda; and he dismantled the
textual coherence of the Bible.18 The first of these claims depended mostly on
15 See chapter 1 for extensive historiography concerning Spinoza’s biblical criticism.

16 Y. Y. Melamed and M. A. Rosenthal, ‘Introduction’, in Y. Y. Melamed and M. A. Rosenthal,
eds, Spinoza’s ‘Theological-Political Treatise’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010) 1–10 (1).
17 J. Israel, ‘The Early Dutch and German Reaction to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus:
Foreshadowing the Enlightenment’s More General Spinoza Reception?’, in Melamed and Rosenthal,
eds, Spinoza’s ‘Theological-Political Treatise’, 72–100 (73); see J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment.
Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
197–217, 275–85; J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation
of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 409–35.
18 Nadler, ‘The Bible Hermeneutics’, 827–8. See also his A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s
Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2011), passim.
Introduction 7
on-biblical sources (Spinoza’s demonstration of the impossibility of events

n
occurring that violated natural laws), and it figures in this book obliquely.
For the other three claims, however—that priesthood emanated from human
needs rather than heavenly vocation, that the concept of divine election was
a political conceit, and that the Bible was an incoherent digest of earlier
writings—Spinoza delved deeply into the biblical text. They are central to this
book. We will see that Spinoza’s claims, constructed on the basis of philological
arguments, were in tune with a broader movement that was already redefining
the Public Church.
It is far from clear what Spinoza hoped to achieve in publishing the Tractatus
theologico-politicus. In Leo Strauss’s influential interpretation of the Tractatus,
the book was meant to be read on two different levels, by two different sorts of
readers. The common people and their spiritual leaders, led by imagination
rather than reason, should read the Tractatus as an exhortation to stick to the
only verifiable biblical teaching, which is to love one another and to obey the
law. Rational people, on the other hand, should see through this superficial
message and understand the Tractatus as a plea to philosophize freely without
regard for any claims purporting to be grounded in divine revelation.19 Strauss
thus distinguished between an esoteric meaning directed at a philosophically
inclined readership, and an exoteric meaning meant for the rabble that t rembled
before the insecurity of life and clung to messages of hope. Strauss’s strict clas-
sification of Spinoza’s readership, distinguishing sharply between philosophers
and believers, has not held its own.20 Nevertheless, a reading of Spinoza’s
Tractatus on two planes of meaning, a socially amenable religious level and
one accomodating a more individualistic worldview, has retained its appeal,
as suggested by the interpretations by Yirmiyahu Yovel and, more recently,
Dan Garber.21
However, even if Spinoza would have preferred a readership that was suffi-
ciently susceptible to reason to abandon repressive superstition, he would have
been naïve to think that the Tractatus would not provoke outrage among those
who read Latin and who stuck to the biblical interpretations imposed by their
clergy.22 What is more, as Susan James has argued, Spinoza and Calvinists
shared elements in their respective views of the relationship between God and
19 L. Strauss, ‘How to Study Spinoza’s “Theologico-Political Treatise”’, Proceedings of the

American Academy for Jewish Research 17 (1947–1948) 69–131.
20 See, e.g., N. Brown, ‘Philosophy and Prophecy: Spinoza’s Hermeneutics’, Political Theory 14
(1986) 195–213. In the Tractatus theologico-politicus Spinoza clearly argues against an unbridge-
able chasm between the ignorant masses and a discerning elite: Spinoza, Oeuvres, V, Traité
Politique, ed. O. Proietti, trans. Ch. Ramond (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005) 186
and 188.
21 Y. Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989);
D. Garber, ‘Should Spinoza Have Published his Philosophy?’, in C. Huenemann, ed., Interpreting
Spinoza: Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 166–87 (182–7).
22 Garber, ‘Should Spinoza Have Published’, 185.
man: awareness of humankind’s cognitive limitations, which prohibited taking

in the entire scope of Providence; the consequent anxiety about the individual’s
place in salvation history; and the trust that humankind was endowed with a
faculty that would prevent this anxiety from degenerating into superstition—
even if Calvinists and Spinoza obviously parted ways where the former identi-
fied this faculty with faith, and the latter with reason. Spinoza was critical of
many notions central to Reformed Christianity, to be sure, but he did share an
idiom with Calvinists that made the Tractatus theologico-politicus relevant
for the author’s Dutch contemporaries.23 Theodor Dunkelgrün and Peter van
Rooden have accordingly characterized the Tractatus as an unequivocal answer
to Calvinist theology, rather than as a camouflaged dialogue with Spinoza’s
philosophical allies.24 This raises the question of how Spinoza’s analysis of
biblical texts affected his Reformed contemporaries, who founded their spiritu-
ality, ecclesiology, and theology on the Bible. This book discusses whether and
to what extent Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus interfered with the way
the Dutch Reformed dealt with the Bible as a historical artefact.
Criticism Philosophical and Philological
Spinoza called into doubt the authenticity of most of the Old Testament, so as
to minimize the amount of biblical content that could with any certainty be
considered prophetically inspired. To that end, he gathered anachronisms and
inconsistencies in the books of the Old Testament known to commentators
since the Middle Ages. To what extent was philology essential to his biblical
criticism?
Spinoza’s engagement with biblical philology has been subject to diametrically
opposed evaluations. Israel has claimed that Spinoza was the first to formulate
the hermeneutical ‘distinction—never really previously systematized—between
the intended or “true” meaning of a passage of text and “truth of fact”’.25 Israel thus
credits Spinoza with a breakthrough in the disciplinary formation of the
humanities: supposedly the philosopher was the first to demand the investiga-
tion of the meaning of a text, prior to asking whether that meaning actually
23 S. James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 36–40.
24 P. T. van Rooden, ‘Spinoza’s bijbeluitleg’, Studia Rosenthaliana 18 (1984) 120–33 (122–6);
Th. Dunkelgrün, ‘“Neerlands Israel”: Political Theology, Christian Hebraism, Biblical Antiquarianism,
and Historical Myth’, in L. Cruz and W. Frijhoff, eds, Myth in History, History in Myth (Leiden:
Brill, 2009) 201–36 (226–36); cfr. D. Lemler, ‘Abraham Ibn Ezra et Moïse Maïmonide cités par
Spinoza’, Revue des Études Juives 168 (2009) 415–64, which contends that the intended audience of
the Tractatus theologico-politicus was Jewish as much as Christian.
25 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 410–11; also, e.g., R. A. Harrisville and W. Sundberg, The
Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs (2nd edn; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2002) 36–45.
Introduction 9
corresponded with what was known about the world.26 Rather than reading
a text as conforming to what was presupposed to be true, according to Israel,
Spinoza started out by establishing what its words and phrases said in the
first place.
Not only is Israel’s claim severely qualified by Anthony Grafton’s important
work on early modern historical theory, which traces the rudiments of a debate
on the separability of ancient texts and factual truth back to fifteenth-century
Italy.27 What is more, Peter van Rooden and Theo Verbeek have also argued
that for Spinoza himself, philological digressions actually had a negative func-
tion, serving only to invalidate existing philological know-how as a useful tool
to solve problems of biblical interpretation. Spinoza’s historical investigation
of the Old Testament led him to conclude that most of the biblical texts were
incoherent, historically contingent, and/or spurious. As Van Rooden and
Verbeek contend, the aim of this exercise was to show that the sound ethical
content of the Bible was unaffected by the historical vicissitudes of the text, and
emerged not through philology but through common sense.28 Similarly, Richard
Popkin and Steven Nadler have asserted that the innovation of the Tractatus lay
less in any single philological insight, but rather in the radical conclusions that
Spinoza drew based on the sum of his observations.29 His exegetical method
was merely instrumental to his philosophical agenda.
Susan James has adopted a middle position in her dispassionate assessment
of Spinoza’s historical arguments in the Tractatus. According to James, Spinoza
‘aligns himself with up-to-date biblical criticism by examining the history of
the text and identifying errors and additions’ (in other words: the philological
assessment of the biblical texts), while at the same time allowing that Scripture
has retained a divine core message that did not reside in the exact phrasing
of the Bible.30 With whichever intentions Spinoza investigated the biblical
texts, constructive or destructive, it is clear that he drew on existing philological
scholarship of the Bible. In what way can the existing seventeenth-century
biblical philology, available for Spinoza to draw on, be said to have disempowered
Scripture?
With the exception of James, the authors cited above share the assumption
that Spinoza approached biblical scholarship with an intellectual disposition
26 Cfr. Bod, A New History of the Humanities, 16.

27 A. Grafton, What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007) 5–61, 248–54.
28 Van Rooden, ‘Spinoza’s bijbeluitleg’, 129–31; Th. Verbeek, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political
Treatise: Exploring ‘The Will of God’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 99–120.
29 Popkin, ‘Spinoza and Bible Scholarship’; Nadler, ‘The Bible Hermeneutics’; also N. Malcolm,
Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 383–431; see also A. Grafton, ‘Spinoza’s
Hermeneutics: Some Heretical Thoughts’, in D. van Miert et al., eds, Scriptural Authority and
Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age: God’s Word Questioned (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017) 177–96.
30 James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics, 161–79.
that differed completely from most of his predecessors and contemporaries.

They give priority to his philosophical programme, which entailed an exclusive
reliance on human reason in conceptualizing humankind, the world, and God.
This is a structure that many, if not most, modern historians have imposed
upon the hermeneutical upheavals of the seventeenth century: there occurred
a philosophical reorientation that enabled certain radical thinkers to appro-
priate biblical scholarship and (ab)use it to drastically re-evaluate the authority
of Scripture.31
Klaus Scholder, for instance, in his important study on the origin of
‘historical-critical theology’ (1966), explicitly denied that specific philological
findings of scholars such as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Jean Le Clerc
(1656–1736) could have been decisive in redefining the authority of Scripture.
Scholder posited that the birth of historical-critical theology was the result of a
‘mental historical revolution in the modern age’, a revolution that he localized
in the epistemological debates engendered by Descartes and Spinoza.32 A simi-
lar mechanism was at the core of the analyses of Hans Joachim Kraus (1956) and
Henning Graf Reventlow (1980), though both accorded a more incisive influ-
ence to the English Deists than to Continental rationalists, while Kraus more-
over attributed to Richard Simon (1638–1712) a foundational role in articulating
a systematic programme of historical criticism.33 Similarly, Henk Jan de Jonge
(1991) pointed at the combined effects of Cartesian and Spinozist rationalism
and English Deism as the forces that in the eighteenth century set theology on
the path to a critical method that did not shy away from treating the Bible as a
collection of texts conceived by human authors.34
More recently the idea of a hermeneutical landslide caused by external tremors
in epistemology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy has found new advo-
cates. Jean Bernier (2010), in his study of Early Modern philological debates
concerning Moses’s authorship of the Pentateuch, distinguishes between ‘old’
and ‘new’ criticism. He identifies the ‘old’ criticism with a method, consisting of
philological subdisciplines such as textual criticism, chronology, genealogy,
and geography. The ‘new’ criticism was an approach, a disposition to question
the authority of biblical texts, stimulated by methodical doubt and an insistence
31 See for a critical assessment of this tendency, S. Mandelbrote, ‘Biblical Hermeneutics and the
New Sciences 1700–1900: An Overview’, in J. M. van der Meer and S. Mandelbrote, eds, Nature
and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: 1700–Present (Leiden: Brill, 2008) 3–37.
32 ‘Geistesgeschichtliche Umbruch der Neuzeit’, K. Scholder, Ursprünge und Probleme der
Bibelkritik im 17. Jahrhundert: ein Beitrag zur Entstehung der historisch-kritischen Theologie
(Munich: Kaiser, 1966) 7–14; Scholder took his cue from G. Ebeling, ‘Die Bedeutung der his-
torisch-kritischen Methode für die protestantische Theologie und Kirche’, Zeitschrift für Theologie
und Kirche, 47 (1950) 1–46.
33 H.-J. Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments (3rd edn;
Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1982) 73–9 and 92–4; Reventlow, Bibelautorität und
Geist der Moderne, 313–69, 470–545.
34 De Jonge, Van Erasmus tot Reimarus, 11–13.
Introduction 11
on autonomous thinking and personal verification. Bernier casts the French

Oratorian Richard Simon and the Amsterdam-based Remonstrant Jean Le
Clerc as the pioneers who combined ‘old’ and ‘new’ criticism, welding together
the sophisticated ‘old’ philology and the ‘new’, relentless questioning of the
authority of Scripture.35
Brad Gregory (2012) has given a twist to the same narrative, reversing the
perspective. He attributes the erosion of biblical truth-claims not to the victory
of criticism as a philosophical attitude, but to the failure of the post-Reformation
churches to assert intellectual authority.36 Underlying this long-term process,
Gregory argues, was a philosophical misstep committed in the late Middle Ages:
nominalists from the fourteenth century onwards abandoned the Christian
notion of God as unknowable, unimaginable, and incommensurable with
Creation. They drew God into the same ontological domain as the world by
beginning to attribute ‘being’ to God. Once the Creator shared ‘being’ with all
of Creation, it became possible to debate what was natural and what was divine.
In the subsequent fragmentation of Latin Christianity into a multitude of
religious denominations, eventually the Word of God fell prey to competing
interpretations, both ecclesiastical and otherwise.37
Gregory’s deliberately provocative thesis relocates the responsibility for
Western secularization in the heart of Christian religion itself. But the skeletal
structure of his explanation of the erosion of biblical authority conforms to that
of more progressivist historians of philosophy: in and of themselves, the study
of biblical languages, biblical texts, and their coherence and historical context
had no power to diminish the authority of Scripture. The loss of the Bible’s
divine aura required a philosophical turn, be it in the form of a radical agenda
or a theological deadlock. Philology could be instrumental, but could never
autonomously dispose of biblical authority.
This book takes the force of metaphysical and epistemological presupposi-
tions into account. However, it questions the assumption that it required advo-
cacy of Spinoza’s metaphysics and epistemology for his biblical criticism to
have had any impact on the Reformed use of the Bible. There may have been
Cartesian philosophers, Deist freethinkers, Epicurean libertines around—but
the weight of their presence would have been dwarfed by the contingents of
divines for whom pastoral care was a more immediate concern than philo-
sophical novelties.38 Reformed ministers, and their professors in university,
35 ‘Méthode critique’ and ‘approche critique’: J. Bernier, La critique du Pentateuque de Hobbes

à Calmet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010) 34–41.
36 B. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2012).
37 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 25–73 and 319–47. Cf. C. Fraenkel, ‘On the Concept
and History of Philosophical Religions’, in J. M. van der Meer and S. Mandelbrote, eds, Nature and
Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: Up to 1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2008) 35–81 (60–76).
38 For the most thorough estimate of the impact of radical philosophy on the Public Church,
see M. R. Wielema, The March of the Libertines: Spinozists and the Dutch Reformed Church
were dependent on the authenticity and intelligibility of the biblical texts,

at least as much as on axiomatic definitions of God, of knowledge, and of
substance. I explore the ways in which Spinoza’s biblical criticism affected their
work with the Bible, even before the philosophical substructure of his argu-
ments forced itself on them. I focus, in other words, on those ministers and
university professors such as Johannes Meier, cited at the outset of this intro-
duction, who worried not in the first place about Spinoza’s definitions of divine
law, divine election, religion, and faith, but about his doubts concerning the
canonicity of biblical texts such as the Book of Ezekiel.
Seventeenth-century Christians, harbouring whatever particular inter-
pretation of the notion of divine inspiration, took it as given that the Bible had
a long history, a history that had affected its composition, phrasing, and generally
accepted meaning. By concentrating on the way ministers, classicists, theo-
logians, and philosophers employed, appropriated, or rejected biblical philology,
I hope to expose the impact of Spinoza’s biblical criticism on those members
of the Reformed Public Church that were not necessarily involved with
metaphysical speculations.
The Bible in the Dutch Reformed Church
The Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century offered ample opportunity

to fight out philosophical, theological, and political conflicts in the arena of
biblical philology.
In this period the Public Church gained its definitive shape, with an institu-
tional framework, a body of theology, a unified liturgy, and pedagogical instru-
ments. A decisive episode was the clash between Jacobus Arminius (1559–1609)
and Franciscus Gomarus (1563–1641) and their respective followers over pre-
destination and the role of the government in relation to the Reformed Church.
This conflict fractured Dutch society as soon as the ‘Twelve Years Truce’ of
1609 had temporarily put an end to the armed conflict between the United
Provinces and the Spanish Monarchy (1568–1648). The theological turmoil
culminated in a national synod held at Dordrecht (1618–1619), bringing victory
to the party of the so-called Contra-Remonstranten (because they opposed
a Remonstrance composed by their adversaries in 1610), who favoured an
exclusive church of the ‘elect’ predestined to salvation. This conflict and its
resolution has traditionally been considered foundational in the formation of
the Early Modern Dutch Public Church and accordingly it has received much
(1660–1750) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2004); cf. Stephen J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion:
The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) 10–44, where the exist-
ence of a ‘Deist movement’ in the decades around 1700 is questioned (with reference to England,
France, and Italy).
Introduction 13
attention from ecclesiastical historians—to the detriment of the remainder of

the seventeenth century.39
Nevertheless, after 1620 the Reformed Church remained subject to tensions
both from without and within.40 One concern was the continued presence of
groups who refused to submit to the Public Church’s dogmatic and disciplinary
standards. Such groups, either convening under the aegis of minority churches
such as the Mennonites and the Remonstrants, or simply private gatherings
with little or no institutional structure (the so-called Collegianten, ‘Collegiants’),
were responsive to ideas and methods that seemed threatening to the conceptual
and social coherence of the Public Church.41
At the same time, within the Public Church there were thinkers and divines
who approached Reformed Christianity in ways that seemed to strain the
boundaries devised to guarantee unity. One important development was the
so-called Nadere Reformatie (‘Further Reformation’). This was a movement
that called on individual members of the Public Church to conduct their day-
to-day life in the service of God. There are analogies with both the Puritans
in the British Isles and the Pietists in Germany. A key term in the Further
Reformation was praecisitas, the observance of divine precepts. A leading pro-
ponent of the Further Reformation was Gisbert Voetius (1589–1676), the most
influential Dutch Reformed theologian of the seventeenth century. He lent
his name to the ‘Voetian’ ministers who regarded the Bible as a ready-made
repository of behavioural rules.42
The Voetian theology of the Further Reformation naturally clashed with two
developments that took place in the same decades. On the one hand, there were
39 The classical study is A. T. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen: kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde
van Maurits en Oldenbarneveldt (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974). Symptomatic for the predominance
of the first two decades of the seventeenth century in ecclesiastical historiography is the publica-
tion under the auspices of the National Institute for Dutch History of the acts of the assemblies of
ecclesiastical administration on a regional level, the classes. These volumes, currently nine in total,
run up to 1620: Classicale acta 1573–1620, Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 9 vols
(The Hague: Nijhoff/Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1980–2012). Similarly, a recently
published volume in commemoration of the Synod of Dordrecht pays scant attention to the
effects and legacy of the events of 1618–1619: A. Goudriaan and F. A. van Lieburg, eds, Revisiting
the Synod of Dordt (1618–1619) (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Cf. J. van Eijnatten and F. A. van Lieburg,
Nederlandse religiegeschiedenis (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005) 172–8; H. J. Selderhuis, ed., Handboek
Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis (Kampen: Kok, 2006) 413–41.
40 Van Eijnatten and Van Lieburg, Nederlandse religiegeschiedenis, 188–240.
41 L. Kołakowski, Chrétiens sans église: la conscience religieuse et le lien confessionel au XVIIe
siècle, trans. A. Posner (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); A. C. Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch
Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
42 J. van den Berg, ‘Die Frömmigkeitsbestrebungen in den Niederlanden,’ in M. Brecht et al.,
eds, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten
Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993) 57–112 (57–8, 81); W. van ’t Spijker,
‘Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676)’, in T. Brienen, ed., De nadere reformatie, beschrijving van haar
voornaamste vertegenwoordigers (Den Haag: Boekencentrum, 1986) 49–84 (65–7); H. Krop,
‘Het “monster van de preciesheid”. Voetius’ programma van de Nadere Reformatie in de ogen
van Martinus Schoock’, Documentatieblad Nadere Reformatie 38 (2014) 2–26.
theologians and philosophers who took an interest in Cartesian method in

biblical interpretation. On the other, there were those who stressed the pro-
phetic rather than the normative character of biblical texts, called ‘Coccejans’,
after the Leiden theologian Johannes Coccejus (1603–1669).43 Each of these
currents occasioned violent polemics in Dutch society.
Biblical interpretation as the battleground of conflicting interests in the
Dutch Reformed Church has been repeatedly investigated over the past dec-
ades. Historians of philosophy have concentrated on the mutual dependency
of fallible human reason and divine revelation in hermeneutical theory.44 In
monographs with a broad scope, Wiep van Bunge and Rienk Vermeij have each
explained the frequent alliances between Cartesians and Coccejans by pointing
to the lenience of the latter towards unrestrained philosophical inquiry—thus
interpreting the appeal of Coccejanism as purely a function of philosophical
interests.45 A notable exception to this trend in Dutch intellectual history is
Eric Jorink (2010), who invoked biblical philology as an inspiration for an
increasingly complex natural philosophy.46
Among historians of religion we may single out the late J. Samuel Preus.
In 2001 he published the most detailed study to date of the hermemeutical
debates among Christians of diverse allegiances within the Dutch Republic in
the years leading up to the publication of Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus
in 1670. Preus’s starting point is the publication, only four years previously, of
Philosophia Sacrae Scripturae interpres (1666) by Lodewijk Meijer (1629–1681).
In this controversial book Meijer, a lexicographer, cultural entrepreneur, and
philosopher from Amsterdam, argued that human reason ought to be the sole
guide in determining the meaning of biblical texts, even if this sometimes
meant emending the text to make it conform to reason. This was an extreme
application of Cartesian rationalism to the interpretation of Scripture, and it
provoked an immediate flood of responses. The merit of Preus’s work is that it
discusses participants in the ensuing debates across the spectrum of the Dutch
Reformed religion: representatives of academic Calvinist theology as well as
43 Van Eijnatten and Van Lieburg, Nederlandse religiegeschiedenis, 210–27.

44 E.g. J. A. van Ruler, ‘Reason Spurred by Faith: Abraham Heidanus and Dutch Philosophy’,
Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland 12 (2001) 21–8; M. R. Wielema, ‘Adriaan Koerbagh:
Biblical Criticism and Enlightenment’, in W. Van Bunge, ed., The Early Enlightenment in the
Dutch Republic, 1650–1750: Selected Papers of a Conference, Held at the Herzog August Bibliothek,
Wolfenbüttel 22–23 March 2001 (Leiden: Brill, 2003) 61–80 (who does mention Koerbagh’s
linguistic and textual-critical approach); Th. Verbeek, ‘Probleme der Bibelinterpretationen:
Voetius, Clauberg, Meyer, Spinoza’, in J. Schönert and F. Vollhardt, eds, Geschichte der
Hermeneutik und die Methodik der textinterpretierenden Disziplinen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005)
188–201.
45 W. van Bunge, From Stevin to Spinoza: An Essay on Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century
Dutch Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2001) 52–4; R. Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans: The Reception of
the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575–1750 (Amsterdam: KNAW, 2002) 318–23.
46 E. Jorink, Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715, trans. P. G. Mason
(Leiden: Brill, 2010) 1–32, 74–108.
Introduction 15
pious outsiders and dilettantes.47 Preus’s starting point, however, the Cartesian
rationalism of Meijer, determines his focus on the theory of biblical inter-
pretation, as articulated by seventeenth-century theologians and philosophers.
As a consequence the practical contribution of philology to this debate remains
underexposed.
Likewise, when studying the protracted conflict between Voetians and
Coccejans, the most intense intra-Calvinist theological clash in the Dutch
Republic of the second half of the seventeenth century, religious historians tend
to concentrate on the philosophical underpinnings of the contestants. Again,
the issue of the role of reason in hermeneutical theory often takes centre stage
in studies of this complex struggle.48 An exception to this philosophical bias is
an article (2003) by Ernestine van der Wall, which succinctly addresses philo-
logical scholarship as well as philosophy in the hermeneutical debates of the
early Enlightenment. She notes that due to the Coccejans’ ‘steadily growing
interest in philology in the early Enlightenment, the ties between biblical exe-
gesis and dogmatics were loosened’.49 However, a detailed study of what hap-
pened in biblical exegesis, parallel to theoretical developments in dogmatics,
is currently missing.
My own efforts here are tuned in to the examples of Van der Wall and Jorink
and continue their move away from the preconception that biblical inter-
pretation necessarily be explained by philosophical positions, focusing instead
on the practice of biblical philology and scholarly exegesis. The explanation of
biblical texts was a daily occupation for clergy, and for students preparing to
enter the clergy, more so than the metaphysical definition of the nature of
God or cognitive faculties that enable humankind to know him. To appreciate
the impact of intellectual innovators like Spinoza on the ‘shepherds of souls’,
it is imperative to start from the point where their interests overlapped: the
plain text of the Bible. By tracing the philological connections and disjunctions
among theologians, scholars, and philosophers in this period, this book
47 J. S. Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001). Lodewijk Meijer’s book: L. Meijer, Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres:
exercitatio paradoxa ([Amsterdam]: s.n., 1666), translated as L. Meijer, Philosophy as the Interpreter
of Holy Scripture (1666), trans. S. Shirley (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005);
cf. R. Bordoli, Ragione e Scrittura tra Descartes e Spinoza: saggio sulla “Philosophia S. Scripturae
Interpres” di Lodewijk Meyer e sulla sua recezione (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1997).
48 E.g. W. J. van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669), trans. R. A. Blacketer
(Leiden: Brill, 2001) 106–35; A. Goudriaan, Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy: Gisbertus
Voetius, Petrus van Mastricht and Anthonius Driessen (Leiden: Brill, 2006); another, more recent
example of the tendency to concentrate on Aristotelianism and Cartesianism as the framework
for hermeneutical conflicts in the second half of the seventeenth century is J. W. Veltkamp, De
menschlijcke reeden onmaetiglijck gelaudeert: de Walcherse Artikelen 1693 tegen de achtergrond van
de Vroege Verlichting in de Republiek (Utrecht: Kok, 2011) 25–79.
49 E. G. E. van der Wall, ‘The Religious Context of the Early Dutch Enlightenment: Moral
Religion and Society’, in Van Bunge, The Early Enlightenment, 39–57 (46–8). Cf. C. Graafland,
‘Voetius als gereformeerd theoloog’, in J. van Oort, ed, De onbekende Voetius (Kampen: J. H. Kok,
1989) 12–31 (24–7).
c ontributes to understanding how outsiders’ assertions concerning the Bible

may have impacted on stakeholders within the Public Church.
That being said, the impact of biblical criticism, both in its philosophical and
philological aspects, on moral and political struggles within the Dutch Public
Church and society at large is not always direct or obvious. Preus and Van der
Wall both observe that although the self-evident nature of the Bible may have
been a central dogma of Reformed Christianity, the clergy nevertheless tried to
impose their interpretation of its content on the laity. Formulaic teachings, as
well as standard translations of the Bible and accompanying explanatory com-
ments, achieved a status that left little room for individual exploration. The
Public Church erected a layered edifice of standard texts, the Formularies of
Unity, which fixed the phrasing and interpretation of Scripture. Officials in
public and ecclesiastical administration and academic teachers were required
to abide by these standard texts: the officially sanctioned translation of the
Bible, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Articles of Dordrecht.
The common people became acquainted with the articles of faith through
vernacular catechization. After the Synod of Dordrecht these formulas of
doctrine and praxis acquired a central function within the disciplinary institu-
tions of the Public Church. In effect the Formularies of Unity constituted a
new ecclesiastical tradition, shielding the public at large from both unaccom-
modating philosophy and abstruse scholarship dealing with inconsistencies,
contradictions, and obscurities in the biblical source texts.50
A landmark in the development of such textual standards was the publica-
tion of an official Bible translation that carried the stamp of approval of state
and Church. In 1637 this translation of the Bible appeared, the so-called
Statenvertaling (‘States’ Translation’). Surprisingly little research has been con-
ducted concerning either the scholarly programme of this translation or the
wider significance of its appearance for subsequent biblical scholarship and
religious culture. Dirk van Miert is the first to have extensively charted the
philological issues that required resolution as the Dutch intellectual crème
de la crème pursued this project, with ecclesiastical and political authorities
breathing down their necks.51 Jonathan Sheehan has shown how up until the
50 Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance, 17–20; Van der Wall, ‘The Religious Context of the Early
Dutch Enlightenment’, 52–3. Cf. A. C. Fix, Fallen Angels: Balthasar Bekker, Spirit Belief, and
Confessionalism in the Seventeenth Century Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999) 17, 20;
Van Eijnatten and Van Lieburg, Nederlandse religiegeschiedenis, 169–78; Selderhuis, Handboek
Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis, 413–15, 438–9.
51 Van Miert, The Emancipation of Biblical Scholarship, chapter 3. Earlier publications on the
States’ Translation and other Early Modern Dutch translations of the Bible are generally anecdotal
rather than analytical. These include A. W. G. Jaakke and E. W. Tuinstra, Om een verstaanbare
bijbel: Nederlandse bijbelvertalingen na de Statenbijbel (Haarlem: Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap,
1990); C. C. de Bruin, De Statenbijbel en zijn voorgangers. Nederlandse bijbelvertalingen vanaf de
Reformatie tot 1637, ed. F. G. M. Broeyer (2nd rev. edn; Haarlem: Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap,
1993); F. G. M. Broeyer, ‘Bible for the Living Room: The Dutch Bible in the Seventeenth Century’,
in M. Lamberigts and A. A. den Hollander, eds, Lay Bibles in Europe 1450–1800, IV, 1600–1700
(Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006) 207–21.
Introduction 17
first half of the seventeenth century, various centralized projects of translation

across Protestant Europe kept the interest of ecclesiastical authorities in biblical
scholarship alive. After that period philological hair-splitting became less con-
genial to the interests of ecclesiastical institutions, who preferred to canonize
the authorized translations (such as the King James Version in England, pub-
lished in 1611) and to surround them with interpretive fences consisting of
annotations and doctrinal commentaries. The States’ Translation of 1637 may
be considered a similar watershed.52 To a certain extent biblical scholarship
became the preserve where professional academics could display their lin-
guistic and philological skills, with little consequence for the interpretation of
Scripture.53 In this situation the interventions of well-informed outsiders could
kick up dust, unsettling the dynamic balance in the unremitting tug-of-war
conducted by inward-looking theologians.
We will see that, despite attempts by the ecclesiastical establishment to con-
tain inconvenient scholarship within the walls of the ivory tower of academia,
a steady flow of awkward, sometimes provocative observations threatened
the sustainability of the standard version of the Bible, and consequently of its
consensual interpretation. The arguments that contributed to such an erosion
of the authority of Reformed orthodoxy came from different directions: from
outside the confessional church and from within, from professional academics
and dilettantes alike. Spinoza’s biblical criticism fed into this flow. In this book
we see how the precarious biblical foundation that the Dutch Reformed had
established for the confessional Public Church after the Synod of Dordrecht
was undermined in the years around 1670, in parallel with the disruption of the
political status quo. The result was not instant Enlightenment. Neither Spinoza
nor anyone else singlehandedly dismantled the confessional edifice by pulling
apart its scriptural foundations, any more than by introducing an alternative
ethics based on human reason. On the contrary: on some accounts these
upheavals rendered religious culture more rigid than before. Yet the transience
of confessional consensus based on Scripture did become manifest.
CONCEPTS AND METHOD
This study moves from the relatively restricted subject matter of Spinoza’s
biblical criticism to the more formidable themes of biblical scholarship and
church history in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. There are some
conceptual aspects that require preliminary discussion. The first issue is the use
52 Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, 1–25.

53 P. T. van Rooden, Theology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabbinical Studies in the Seventeenth
Century: Constantijn L’Empereur (1591–1648), Professor of Hebrew and Theology at Leiden, trans.
J. C. Grayson (Leiden: Brill, 1989).
of the unifying term ‘biblical philology’, which denotes, somewhat artificially,

a set of scholarly practices distinct from philosophical and theological specula-
tion. Similarly, some justification is called for the introduction of the term
‘scripturarianism’. This term serves to identify a disposition among certain
Calvinist scholars to continue investigating the biblical source texts using
philological techniques even after the appearance of the States’ Translation,
a disposition that was controversial in its own right. Finally we should discuss
the shift, as the book proceeds, from learned treatises, to pamphlets, to archives
of local ecclesiastical administrative units, and the question of how these types
of sources can be combined in a meaningful way.
Biblical Philology
First of all, it is useful to consider the various tools of historical scholarship that
I subsume under the umbrella term ‘biblical philology’. As Popkin suggested,
Spinoza’s historical criticism of the Bible, as distinct from his metaphysics, fell
into line with an existing tendency within Dutch biblical scholarship to situate
religion as it occurred in the Bible within its historical context.54 This mode of
biblical scholarship drew on a range of philological techniques: the reconstruc-
tion of the authentic source texts, linguistic expertise, and elucidation of the
historical context in which source texts had been produced.
The tension engendered by biblical philology within the dynamics of the
religious life of the Dutch Reformed Church is at the heart of this book. How
did Dutch Calvinists cope with a historically grown corpus of sacred texts as
the foundational source of saving knowledge? Rather than limiting myself to
the textual criticism of Spinoza and other highly controversial authors of the
seventeenth century, as for instance Jean Bernier has done, I will investigate the
broader context of early modern biblical philology within which Spinoza’s
textual criticism took shape.55 In a wider European perspective, but with a
heavy focus on England and Germany, and with an emphasis on the eighteenth
century, such an approach has also informed the studies by Jonathan Sheehan
(2005) and Michael Legaspi (2011).56
A key issue in historical scholarship as practised in the Early Modern age
was whether ancient texts ought to be judged as if they were part of present-day
culture, or whether they essentially belonged to a bygone, alien culture. The
detachment of the past from the present, as something irretrievably finished—
past, properly speaking—was a long-drawn-out process. Over the course of
the seventeenth century some scholars began to articulate an awareness of the
distance that separated them from the cultural legacies of the classical and
54 Popkin, ‘Spinoza and Bible Scholarship’, 397. 55 Bernier, La critique du Pentateuque.

56 Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible; Legaspi, The Death of Scripture.
Introduction 19
the Judaeo-Christian past they studied. With this awareness came a technical
vocabulary to indicate the expertise required for making sense of ancient texts:
kritikè or critica, emendatio, explicatio.57 Many Early Modern scholars, includ-
ing Calvin—though many others disagreed—concurred that the literal phras-
ings of biblical texts had been the work of human beings, conditioned by the
period, region, and circumstances in which they wrote.58 Yet the application
to the Bible of the art of kritikè, as it took shape in the seventeenth century,
was never free from the suspicion of profanation. It required a careful balancing
act to determine to what extent biblical texts could be studied like any other
ancient text, and to what extent divine inspiration made them immune to
scholarship.59
To the extent that seventeenth-century scholars, theologians, and philosophers
situated biblical texts in the historical context in which these texts had been
produced, they had a set of scholarly tools and skills at their disposal: textual
criticism, language studies, historical contextualization (including anti-
quarianism and chronology). These tools served to establish the constitution,
authenticity, and verbatim significance of an ancient text—quite apart from its
spiritual or philosophical interpretation, or its application to the present. For
the totality of these tools of historical scholarship I use the overarching term
‘philology’, in an intentionally unspecific sense.
The word ‘philology’ may suggest a degree of technical precision that is
actually belied by the range of ways it is used. In a narrow sense it indicates the
analysis of the composition of a text in terms of earlier versions, often com-
bined with an effort to establish the original version. Such a well-defined
discipline took shape only in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany
and is associated, in its definitive form, with Karl Lachmann (1793–1851).60 In a
much broader sense, the word also encompasses all techniques developed for
laying bare the meaning of a text, as opposed to its truth value. Sheldon Pollock
(2009), in a programmatic article on the social value of philology, opts for the
extremely malleable definition ‘making sense of historical texts’.61 He distin-
guishes this from linguistics on the one hand, which makes sense of languages,
and philosophy on the other, which makes sense of thought.
In this book the word ‘philology’ refers to the study of ancient texts and
the historical society they convey, by drawing on textual criticism, language
57 B. Bravo, ‘Critice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century and the Rise of the Notion of
Historical Criticism’, in C.R. Ligota and J.-L. Quantin, eds, History of Scholarship: A Selection of
Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 135–95 (145–82).
58 Harrisville and Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, 19–21; Van Bunge, From Stevin to
Spinoza, 50–4.
59 Bravo, ‘Critice’, 183–94.
60 S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (Florence: Le Monnier, 1963); Bravo,
‘Critice’, 171–6.
61 Pollock, ‘Future Philology?’, 933–4.
studies, and historical contextualization. The term accommodates such varied

aspects of the analysis of historical texts as nowadays go by the names of
(conjectural) emendation, grammar, idiom, style, translation, codicology,
palaeography, history, epigraphy, numismatics.62 ‘Biblical philology’ denotes
the application of these scholarly tools and skills to the Bible. This amalgamate
definition of biblical philology corresponds to the way Van Miert uses it—even
if in the examples of scholarly practice in this book a slightly different emphasis
is apparent than in Van Miert’s study, which concentrates on the first half of the
seventeenth century.63 In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
language studies, antiquarianism, and chronology became more prominent in
biblical philology, at the expense of textual criticism.64 This is reflected in the
specific discussions of the second half of the seventeenth century that figure in
this book.
Biblical philology is thus a set of methods used in historical scholarship that
I distinguish, for analytical reasons, from philosophy (epistemology, logic,
metaphysics, ethics, natural philosophy) and theology (systematic and moral).
In practice, we will see that philology, philosophy, and theology were seldom
completely separated. Philological study of the Bible was usually guided by
theological or philosophical concerns, and conversely the results of philology
were often seized upon in the service of some theological or philosophical
programme. Yet by focusing on the philological aspects of biblical investiga-
tion, I hope to expose the terrain where participants in debates encountered
one another, in spite of their sometimes radically divergent theological or
philosophical preconceptions.
Scripturarianism
By examining the way leading members of the Dutch Reformed Church

appealed to Scripture, we come to understand where Spinoza’s biblical philology
hurt. From the early seventeenth century onwards, within the respective
Calvinist establishments of the Dutch Republic, the British kingdoms, and
Geneva, the texts, history, and sense of the Bible’s literal meaning had become
immobilized by the adoption of standard editions, translations, and accompany-
ing commentaries. In the same period, biblical scholarship was seized upon
by philosophers whose critical attitude to authority and received knowledge
62 For the position of ‘antiquarian’ subdisciplines such as iconography, epigraphy, and numis-
matics in the development of ‘classical scholarship’, in the Early Modern period, see A. Momigliano,
The Foundations of Classical Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 54–79;
and G. Salmeri, ‘L’arcipelago antiquario’, in E. Vaiani, Dell’antiquaria e dei suoi metodi. Atti delle
giornate di studio (Pisa: Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, Scuola Normale Superiore, 1998) 257–80.
63 Van Miert, The Emancipation of Biblical Philology, Preface.
64 Levitin, ‘From Sacred History to the History of Religion’, 1123–5.
Introduction 21
endangered confessional consensus. Debates concerning the historical specifi-

city of ancient texts, including the Bible, continued both within and outside the
clergy. Erudite and ingenious biblical scholars found themselves in an awk-
ward predicament: they strove to advance the understanding of the corpus of
sacred texts, but were well aware that their efforts potentially provided
enemiesof the churches with ammunition for criticism.
As indicated above, within the spectrum of theology after the Synod of
Dordrecht there were divergent opinions concerning the need for continued
investigation of biblical source texts in their historical genesis and transmis-
sion. Generally it was the Coccejans rather than the Voetians who employed
the tools of philological scholarship in the service of new forms of exegesis.65
Yet not all seventeenth-century proponents of philology in biblical studies can
be fitted within the theological dichotomy of Voetianism versus Coccejanism.
Some biblical scholars with a strong interest in philology steered their own
course, inspired by international developments in biblical scholarship. This book
pays considerable attention to the network of scholars around the Groningen
professor Jacobus Alting (1618–1679), an orthodox but nevertheless controver-
sial theologian, on account of their sophisticated competence in Hebrew lan-
guage and familiarity with Jewish sources. Alting inherited the interest in
philological study of the Bible from his father Hendrik Alting (1583–1644),
continuing a humanist tradition that in Groningen went back to Regnerus
Praedinius (1510–1559) and even Wessel Gansfort (1419/20–1489).66 Alting and
his fellow scholars employed a philologically informed variety of exegesis that
shows affinities with that of Coccejus and his followers, even if in the field of
theological speculation the two groups could diverge substantially. Thus the
method of applying philological techniques to biblical source texts was conten-
tious in itself. Focusing on this aspect of Reformed theological debate enables
us to appreciate that Spinoza aggravated tensions already present in Calvinist
theological practice.
I thus distinguish the methodological aspect of the theological struggles
within the Dutch Reformed Church from their systematic theological aspect.
This allows me to group together those theologians who stand out because
of their engagement with philology in their biblical studies, even if they cannot
be considered to have belonged to the same theologico-political party or
faction.67 For this group I use the term ‘scripturarian’, a coinage based on the
65 Van der Wall, ‘The Religious Context’, 46–8; Graafland, ‘Voetius als gereformeerd theoloog’,
24–7.
66 D. Nauta, ‘Alting, Jacobus’, in BLGNP, II, 24–6; see J. Lindeboom, Het bijbels humanisme in
Nederland: Erasmus en de vroege reformatie, ed. C. Augustijn (Leeuwarden: Dykstra, 1982 [repr. of
1913]) 39–58, 167–72.
67 For terminological problems in describing political allegiances in this period, see D. J. Roorda,
Partij en factie: de oproeren van 1672 in de steden van Holland en Zeeland, een krachtmeting tussen
partijen en facties (Groningen: Wolters, 1961) 1–36.
seventeenth-century term scripturarius. Both Jacobus Alting and Johannes

Coccejus were liable to be called scripturarius by their opponents because of the
heavy emphasis that each man placed on the philological investigation of bib-
lical source texts.68 In a preface to a series of disputations on Hebrew linguis-
tics and antiquities Alting exhorted his readers to look for the Word of God in
Scripture itself, where it was to be found ‘more abundantly, more clearly and
more sweetly’ than in any ‘rivulets of human derivation’, that is to say ready-
made translations and catechetical guides to the Bible.69 This image, of the
limpid fountainhead of the text of the Bible in its original languages, as opposed
to the murky streams of fallibly human translations and adaptations, originated
with Erasmus (who in turn had derived the image from Jerome).70 Alting
invoked the image to stress his commitment to scholarship that practised its
philological techniques on the source texts of Scripture without regard for deci-
sions previously made in the composition of authorized translations and the
Formularies of Unity. It is this commitment to the scholarly investigation of
biblical source texts in their original languages that is conveyed by the term
‘scripturarian’.
Concentrating on the scripturarians who were active in the Dutch Reformed
Church of the second half of the seventeenth century enables us to discern
tensions that applied partly outside the hermeneutical conflicts between dog-
matists and rationalists that have dominated the historiography of this period.
Adherents to the standard texts and doctrines, such as Voetius and Samuel
Maresius (1599–1673), who generally looked with little favour upon rationalist
hermeneutics, were not inclined to endorse the free philological investigation
of the biblical text advocated by the scripturarians either. Yet the latter were
following not so much the example of Descartes, but rather that of Erasmus,
as suggested by the Erasmian imagery borrowed by Alting.71 Instead of judg-
ing debates about scriptural interpretation in this period exclusively in terms
of rationalism and dogmatism, I prefer to add ‘scripturarianism’ as a third
68 Van der Wall, ‘The Religious Context’, 48; Nauta, ‘Alting’, 24. For an extensive discussion of
the emergence of the scripturarii as a group of likeminded exegetes in the Dutch Republic during
the second half of the seventeenth century, overlapping in part but not entirely with the Coccejans,
see J. J. Touber, ‘Biblical Philology and Hermeneutical Debate in the Dutch Republic in the Second
Half of the Seventeenth Century’, in Van Miert et al., Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism,
325–47 see also chapter 4 of this book.
69 ‘Sua quemque fide vivere oportet, & haec ut tuta sit, ipsiusmet Dei verbo (quale extra
Scripturam V. & N. Testamenti hodie nullum superest,) niti debet; quod in fonte suo & copiosius,
& limpidius, & dulcius invenire est, quam in ullis humanae derivationis rivulis, aut excisionis
lacunis.’ Jacobus Alting, Opera omnia, ed. Balthasar Bekker (Amsterdam: G. Borstius, 1685–1687),
V, 442.
70 Jenkins and Preston, Biblical Scholarship and the Church, 15–17 and 36–7; A. Grafton,
‘Church History in Early Modern Europe: Tradition and Innovation’, in K. van Liere, S. Ditchfield,
and H. Louthan, eds, Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012) 3–26 (14–15).
71 See Touber, ‘Biblical Philology and Hermeneutical Debate’.
Introduction 23
term to characterize the positions that contestants had at their disposal, thus
enriching the range of choices which were available within one and the same
confession.
This third term makes for a more complex model of how the Dutch Reformed
dealt with the Bible. Instead of a linear progression that ran from reactionary
dogmatism to forward-looking rationalism, hermeneutical debates moved
within a triangular scheme. At the corners of the triangle we find dogmatism,
rationalism, and scripturarianism. The differences between dogmatists and
rationalists were played out in terms of hermeneutical theory. The scripturari-
ans and their respective opponents fought one another in the field of biblical
scholarship. The positions were not absolute or exclusive. Scripturarians might
agree on some accounts with rationalists. Scholars might also combine scrip-
turarianism with a certain degree of dogmatism, and turn against rationalism.
In fact, one and the same person might appeal to a combination of scriptuarian,
dogmatist, and rationalist arguments, making it in many cases an aspect of
biblical interpretation rather than a fixed position. The point is that the triangle
accommodates a wider range of approaches towards the Bible, and allows for a
less linear, less teleological model. It conveys the multilateral conflict that pro-
pelled the Dutch Reformed religion, with its Bible, towards the Enlightenment.
A word needs to be said about ‘scripturarianism’ and sola scriptura. A scrip-
turarian orientation does not imply a stronger adherence to the Protestant
principle of sola scriptura than the dogmatist orientation. Sola scriptura, ‘only
by means of Scripture’, indicates that the Bible is the only verified source of
divine knowledge accessible to human beings. The principle determines that
human understanding of salvation ultimately derives from Scripture. However,
it does not determine how Scripture should be interpreted.72 For a dogmatist,
the authorized translation, the accompanying annotations, and the Formularies
of Unity were the essential tools for a Christian to read the Bible in a proper
way. A scripturarian, on the other hand, was satisfied with only the biblical
texts in their original languages. Both scripturarians and dogmatists ultimately
needed to engage with questions about whether specific biblical passages needed
to be interpreted as descriptions of historical events, or as express precepts,
or as allegorically phrased teachings. At that point they might adopt the same
hermeneutical stance. Yet prior to the application of any biblical passage, dog-
matists and scripturarians disagreed about what the Bible actually, literally
said, and how that was to be determined—the ‘true’ meaning of a text, which
Spinoza had made central to his hermeneutical method. It is this part of the
exegetical process that I foreground in this book: the various approaches
towards applying philological tools to understand the literal meaning of a biblical
passage in its historical context, across the philosophical and theological
72 J. A. Steiger, Philologia Sacra: zur Exegese der Heiligen Schrift im Protestantismus des 16. bis
18. Jahrhunderts (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Theologie, 2011).
spectrum of the Dutch Republic in the second half of the seventeenth century.
This is main subject of chapters 2 and 3.
Sources: Treatises, Pamphlets, Minutes
It is one thing to compare the biblical criticism of Spinoza with the biblical
interpretations of his learned contemporaries. It is another thing to look for
the impact that his work, or biblical scholarship in general, might have had on
society beyond the limited elite who devoted their lives to scholarship con-
ducted in Latin. While existing historiography has generated an enormous
amount of knowledge and enhanced our understanding of the way Spinoza’s
hermeneutics related to the biblical interpretation of individual thinkers,
answers to the question of how broader segments of society responded to the
upheavals in the intellectual sphere remain very obscure. The broad commu-
nity of Dutch Reformed churchgoers is still shrouded in darkness, in contrast
to the flashing sparks of a limited number of philosophers and theologians as
they crossed swords with each other in their small, combative circles.
This book cannot presume fully to penetrate that darkness, but it will attempt
to discern a glimmer of the social effects of biblical criticism. For this, another
type of source is required than the treatises, manuscripts, and correspondence
written by and for scholars. The archives of ecclesiastical institutions contain
records of the deliberations of pastors and officials responsible for doctrinal
orthodoxy and moral discipline under their jurisdiction. These documents
reflect the problems that the clergy encountered in managing the daily business
of religious life. On the one hand, the ministers taking part in these assemblies
had generally received theological instruction at a university; they may be
supposed to have been familiar to some extent with intellectual developments
regarding biblical interpretation. On the other hand, their concern was primar-
ily with the welfare of the Church on a local, regional, or provincial level.
The issues they raised therefore reflect, not so much philosophical debate,
but what was actually perceived as problematic by members of Reformed
congregations.73
Research in ecclesiastical records with the aim of finding traces of the con-
troversial philosophies of the early Enlightenment has been conducted before.
Much of it dates back about a century, when Koenraad Meinsma, Willem
Knuttel, and Jacob Freudenthal published studies based in part on such records
that documented the lives of Spinoza and other seventeenth-century critics of
73 G. Groenhuis, De predikanten: de sociale positie van de gereformeerde predikanten in de

Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden voor ± 1700 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1977), 21–6;
F. A. van Lieburg, Profeten en hun vaderland: de geografische herkomst van de gereformeerde
predikanten in Nederland van 1572 tot 1816 (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1996) 70–83.
Introduction 25
the established church.74 A more recent work is The March of the Libertines
(2005) by Michiel Wielema, who has investigated a large number of ecclesias-
tical archives. He has traced heterodox movements inspired by rationalist
philosophers that occurred at the congregational level in the provinces of
Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, and Overijssel.75 These studies, though, tend to
look for straightforward manifestations of Spinozism and other unorthodox
philosophies. Their interest is in the courageous libertines who were confronted
with a forbidding army of bigots. By adopting a perspective that considers the
interests of the clergy and the potential effects that exegetical ‘novelties’ might
have on their flocks, we appreciate the responses and the confusion caused in
such assemblies by developments on an abstract, intellectual level.
The administration of the Public Church in the Dutch Republic had a colle-
giate structure. At the local level the basic organizational unit was the con-
sistory, supervised by a combination of ministers, deacons, and elders. The
consistory met regularly to discuss disciplinary matters in their congregation,
as well as practical matters concerning pastoral work, the church building,
facilities, and finance. If something came up that seemed particularly i mportant,
or impossible to resolve within the congregation, the consistory might refer the
matter to a regional body, the classis. In the classis a number of consistories
were represented. On average, the classes of the Dutch Reformed Church
met every one to three months. This was the church body responsible for the
examination and appointment of new ministers. Above the classes was the
highest level of church administration, the synod, with a jurisdiction that
covered a whole province (or half the province in the case of Holland, where
there were two ‘Particular’ Synods). The classes sent representatives to the
provincial synods, which usually gathered once every year. A provincial synod
also received delegates from the secular government (the Provincial States), as
well as from the synods of the other Dutch Provinces, so the topics discussed at
the synodal level were considered to be of interest to the Public Church at large.
Moreover, because every provincial synod sent delegates to every other provin-
cial synod, this was also the level of ecclesiastical administration where issues
were most likely to spill over from one province to the next.76
74 K. O. Meinsma, Spinoza en zĳn kring: historisch-kritische studiën over Hollandsche vrĳgeesten

(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1896); J. Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s in Quellenschriften,
Urkunden und nichtamtlichen Nachrichten (Leipzig: Von Veit, 1899); W. P. C. Knuttel, Acta der
particuliere synoden van Zuid-Holland, 1621–1700, 6 vols (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1908–1916). Knuttel
was interested, like Meinsma, in the history of ‘freethinkers’, as appears from other publications:
W. P. C. Knuttel, Ericus Walten (s.l.: s.n., ca. 1900); W. P. C. Knuttel, Balthasar Bekker: de bestrijder
van het bijgeloof (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1906); W. P. C. Knuttel, Verboden boeken in de Republiek der
Vereenigde Nederlanden: beredeneerde catalogus (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1914).
75 Wielema, The March of the Libertines.
76 S. Cuperus, Kerkelijk leven der Hervormden in Friesland tijdens de Republiek (Leeuwarden:
Meijer & Schaafsma, 1916) 7–63; Van Eijnatten and Van Lieburg, Nederlandse religiegeschiedenis,
227, 229.
Because of the frequency with which the assemblies gathered, especially the
consistories and classes, they produced a massive amount of records. It has
proved impossible to go through these records systematically, even for a limited
period of time such as the chronological arc of this book, 1660–1710. Moreover,
the bulk of these deliberations concern quite mundane issues such as the
payment of dues for poor relief, or excessive alcohol consumption by members
of congregations. Therefore, I have limited myself to the set of issues that
cropped up that did have bearing on the interpretation of the biblical text and
its relevance for the position of the Church in society. Pamphlets that discussed
contentious issues have guided me geographically as well as thematically: if an
issue that was the subject of scholarly debate generated vernacular pamphlets
as well, repeatedly such pamphlets mentioned disciplinary deliberations by
ecclesiastical administrative bodies. In such cases I have sought the adminis-
trative records that discuss the issues, and have tried to determine what
interests were at stake, as well as to discern the dynamics determining the
evolution of the case. This procedure has yielded results that are the subject of
chapters 4 and 5.
THIS B O OK
Starting from the Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza’s outstanding work

of biblical criticism, I move outward in ever-widening circles to explore the
fascinations and threats of biblical philology in the Dutch Republic in the second
half of the seventeenth century. The focus here is on the Public Church, the
dominant Dutch ecclesiastical institution to emerge from the Calvinist brand
of the Reformation, which was given its definitive shape at the Synod of
Dordrecht. The first responses to the Tractatus theologico-politicus indicate the
exegetical issues that the Calvinists wrestled with, the limits of what was accept-
able, and the particular sensitivities that shaped debates about innovations in
biblical interpretation. A broader exploration of Reformed biblical scholarship
in the second half of the seventeenth century shows that these exegetical issues
did not crop up exclusively as a consequence of the rationalist approach to
the biblical interpretations of a few philosophers, such as those proposed by
Spinoza and Meijer. By paying attention to biblical history and to antiquar
ianism in particular, we see that the philological study itself of biblical texts
exposed a multitude of potentially unsettling uncertainties regarding the
interpretation of Scripture. Finally, the perspective shifts from scholarship to
ecclesiastical politics, so as to judge the extent to which scholarly issues perme-
ated the deliberations of the administrative institutions responsible for the
functioning of the Church in everyday life.
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kotiinsa. Ainoastaan konttoripoika oli jäljellä. Olin tehnyt muutamia
muistiinpanoja herra Holladayn sanelun mukaan ja mennyt jälleen
pöytäni ääreen työskentelemään muistiinpanoineni, kun etummainen
ovi avattiin ja herra Holladayn tytär tuli sisään. Hän kysyi minulta,
oliko hänen isällään vieraita, ja kun minä vastasin 'ei', avasi hän
sisähuoneen oven ja meni hänen yksityiskonttoriinsa. Siellä hän
viipyi noin kymmenen minuuttia; sitten hän tuli taas ulos, meni
kiireesti ohi katsomatta minuun ja lähti, kuten otaksun, talosta. Kun
olin lopettanut muistiinpanojeni järjestämisen, lähdin herra
Holladaylta kysymään, oliko hänellä antaa vielä jotakin tehtäväkseni,
löysin hänet makaamassa työpöytänsä ääressä kumarassa, veitsi
pistettynä kaulaan ja vuotaen verta. Hain apua, mutta hän kuoli
tulematta tuntoihinsa — niin, tahtoisin sanoa, että hän varmasti oli
kuollut jo minun sisääntullessani.»
Tunsin pikemmin kuin kuulin sen hiljaisen kohahduksen, joka kävi

läpi huoneen. Jotakin kuvaamattoman salaperäistä oli tässä
kertomuksessa ja siinä johtopäätöksessä, johon se välttämättömästi
vei.
»Palatkaamme nyt vielä hetkiseksi taaksepäin», sanoi

tutkintotuomari, kun Rogers vaikeni ja kuumeentapaisesti pyyhki
otsaansa. »Haluan, että lautakunta saa aivan täyden selvyyden
kertomuksestanne. Herra Holladay oli sanellut teille, sanoitteko
niin?»
»Kyllä.»
»Ja hän oli aivan terve?»
»Niin — kuten tavallisesti. Viime aikoina oli hän kärsinyt jotakin

vatsakipua.»
»Mutta hän voi kuitenkin hoitaa liikeasiansa?»
»Kyllä, varsin hyvin. Hänen sairautensa ei ollut mitään vakavaa

laatua.»
»Te läksitte hänen huoneestansa ja menitte takaisin omaan

huoneeseenne.
Kuinka kauan olitte ollut siellä, kun ulomman konttorin ovi avattiin?»
»En kauempaa kuin viisi minuuttia.»
»Ja kuka oli tulija?»
»Neiti Frances Holladay, päämieheni tytär.»
»Oletteko aivan varma siitä? Tunnetteko hänet hyvin?»
»Oikein hyvin. Olen tuntenut hänet monta vuotta. Hänellä oli

tapana ajaa konttoriimme iltapäivisin noutamaan isäänsä. Luulin
hänen eilen tulleen samassa tarkoituksessa.»
»Katsoitteko häneen tarkkaavasti?»
Rogers käännähti kärsimättömänä tuolillaan.
»Minä katsahdin häneen, kuten aina teen», sanoi hän. »En

tuijottanut.»
»Mutta olette aivan varma siitä, että se oli neiti Holladay?»
»Ehdottomasti varma. Hyvä Jumala», huudahti hän, hermojensa

samassa antaessa perään, »luuletteko, että minä tekisin sellaisen
ilmiannon, jollen olisi asiasta ehdottoman varma?»
»En», vastasi tutkintotuomari tyynnyttäen; »sitä en tietysti luule, en
hetkeäkään, herra Rogers. Minä tahdon vain, että lautakunta näkee,
kuinka varma olette tuntemisestanne. Saanko jatkaa?»
»Olkaa hyvä!» sanoi Rogers. »Koetan olla maltillisempi.»
»Saatan huomata, että se on teistä vaikeata», huomautti tuomari

ystävällisesti; »ja säästän teitä niin paljon kuin voin. No niin, kun neiti
Holladay oli mennyt yksityiskonttoriin, kuinka kauan hän oli siellä?»
»Noin kymmenen minuuttia, luullakseni; ei ainakaan kauempaa.»
»Kuulitteko mitään keskustelua tai mitään muuta tavatonta melua

sisältä?»
»En. Kuuluakseen olisi melun pitänyt olla tavattoman kovaäänistä.

Herra Holladayn konttorin seinät ovat paksut ja estävät kaiken äänen
pääsemästä ulos.»
»Ja niin tuli neiti Holladay ulos?»
»Niin.»
»Ja meni teidän ohitsenne?»
»Niin, hän meni hyvin kiireesti ohi.»
»Eikö se teistä ollut kummallista?»
»Ei tietysti, sillä hänellä oli harvoin tapana pysähtyä puhelemaan

minun kanssani. Minulla oli kiire, niin että en kiinnittänyt siihen
seikkaan sen enempää huomiota.»
»Kiinnitittekö huomiotanne hänen ulkomuotoonsa? Näyttikö hän
kiihtyneeltä?»
»Sitä seikkaa en pannut merkille. Minä katsoin vain vilkaisemalla

ylös ja kumarsin. Sitäpaitsi en nähnyt hänen kasvojaan lainkaan,
sillä hän käytti harsoa.»
»Harsoa!» toisti tutkintotuomari. »Ette ole maininnut ennen, että

hänellä oli harso.»
»En. Kun hän tuli konttoriin, oli hänellä se nostettuna

hatunreunustan yli — tiedätte kyllä, kuinka naisilla on tapana pitää
sitä.»
»Vai niin, te näitte hänen kasvonsa selvästi, kun hän tuli sisään?»
»Näin.»
»Mutta kun hän poistui, oli hänellä harso laskettuna alas. Oliko se
tiheä?»
»Hm.» Todistaja epäröi. »Se oli aivan tavallinen harso,

luullakseni.»
»Mutta kuitenkin tarpeeksi tiheä salaamaan hänen kasvonsa?»
»Niin.»
Tutkintotuomari nyökäytti päätään.
»No, herra Rogers, kuinka kauan aikaa kului naisen poislähdöstä

siihen, kun te menitte yksityiskonttoriin?»
»Ei kauempaa kuin kolme, neljä minuuttia. Arvelin, että herra
Holladay ehkä valmistautui lähtemään tyttärensä mukana, enkä
halunnut häntä pidättää.»
»Ja silloin näitte hänet, sanoitte niin, makaamassa pöytänsä yli

kumarassa, veitsi kaulassa veren virratessa haavasta. Tunsitteko
veitsen?»
»Kyllä, se oli hänen veitsensä — sama, joka hänellä oli

kirjoituspöydällä kynien teroitusta ja raaputtamista varten.»
»Oliko se terävä?»
»Siinä oli vain yksi terä, joka oli hyvin terävä.»
Tutkintotuomari otti käteensä veitsen, joka oli hänen edessään

pöydällä.
»Onko se tämä?» kysyi hän.
Rogers katseli sitä tarkoin.
»Kyllä se on se», vastasi hän.
Sen jälkeen lähetettiin veitsi kiertämään lautakunnan keskuuteen.

Kun he olivat katselleet sitä, tutkimme Royce ja minä sitä. Veitsi oli
tavallinen, yksiteräinen raaputusveitsi, varustettuna norsunluisella
päällä. Se oli käännetty auki ja huomatakseni oli terä, jonka pituus oli
noin kaksi ja puoli tuumaa, todellakin hyvin terävä.
»Oletteko hyvä ja selitätte herra Holladayn asennon», jatkoi

tuomari.
»Hän oli kumarassa pöydän ääressä, kädet ojennettuina ja pää
vinossa.»
»Ja verta oli vuotanut paljon?»
»Hirveän paljon! Joku oli nähtävästi koettanut pysähdyttää sen

vuodon, sillä jonkun matkan päässä siitä oli läpeensä verinen
nenäliina.»
Tutkintotuomari otti esiin nenäliinan ja ojensi sen todistajalle.
»Onko se tämä?» kysyi hän.
»Kyllä», vastasi Rogers hetkisen perästä.
»Onko se miehen vai naisen nenäliina?»
»Naisen luonnollisesti.»
Lautakunta tarkasteli sitä ja niin teimme mekin. Nenäliina oli pieni,

nelikulmainen, palttinainen ilman mitään nimimerkkiä, jonka minä
olisin voinut huomata, ihan verinen — epäilemättä naisen. Rogers
kertoi nyt lopun tapausten kulusta — kuinka hän oli hakenut apua ja
ilmoittanut poliisille.
»Nyt on jäljellä vain yksi kysymys, herra Rogers», sanoi tuomari

lopuksi. »Oletteko tiennyt jotakin Holladaysta tai hänen liikkeestään,
joka aiheuttaisi luulemaan, että kysymyksessä on itsemurha?»
Todistaja ravisti varmasti päätään.
»En mitään», sanoi hän painolla. »Hänen liikeyrityksensä

kukoistivat, hän oli iloinen ja tyytyväinen — niin, hän tuumitteli juuri
tehdä ulkomaamatkan tyttärensä kanssa.»
»Otaksukaamme hetkeksi», jatkoi Goldberg, »että hän todellakin
olisi itse pistänyt veitsen itseensä tyttärensä läsnäollessa; mitä
olisitte luonnollisesti odottanut tyttären silloin tehneen?»
»Huutaneen apua, kutsuneen väkeä», vastasi Rogers.
»Tietysti, se on selvää.» Goldberg nyökäytti päällikölleni päätään.

»Jätän nyt todistajan teille, herra Royce», sanoi hän.
»Herra Rogers», alkoi päällikköni juhlallisesti, »te tiedätte

luonnollisesti, että koko asia tällä hetkellä riippuu siitä, tunnetteko tai
ettekö tunne sitä naista, joka otaksuttavasti oli herra Holladayn
yksityiskonttorissa silloin kun hän pistettiin kuoliaaksi. Haluan täysin
varmentua tästä teidän tuntemisestanne. Oletteko hyvä ja sanotte,
miten hän oli puettuna?»
Todistaja mietti vähän aikaa.
»Hänellä oli tummanpunainen puku», vastasi hän vihdoin, »ja siinä

jonkunlaiset kapeat reunusteet — mustat ehkä. Siinä on kaikki, mitä
minä voin teille sanoa.»
»Ja hattu?»
»Hattuun en kiinnittänyt huomiota. Katsoin häneen vain

kiireisesti.»
»Mutta tästä kiireisestä katseesta huolimatta, herra Rogers, ettekö

nähnyt mitään eriskummaista — mitään, joka olisi herättänyt teissä
ajatusta, että se ehkä ei ollutkaan neiti Holladay?»
»En, en mitään.»
»Ei mitään erikoista hänen olennossaan — tai ulkomuodossaan?»
Todistaja epäröi.
»Ajattelin, että hän ei ollut aivan yhtä hyvän näköinen kuin

tavallisesti», sanoi hän pitkäveteisesti. — »Hän näytti vähän
kalpealta ja heikolta.»
»Konttorissahan oli pimeä kello viiden aikaan eilisiltana, vai

kuinka?»
»Olimme sytyttäneet kaasun puoli tuntia aikaisemmin.»
»Onko teidän konttorinne hyvin valaistu?»
»Minulla on lamppu pöytäni kohdalla, ja toinen lamppu on

seinässä.»
»Ette siis voinut nähdä kävijän kasvoja ihan selvästi?»
»En, mutta kaikessa tapauksessa kyllin selvästi tunteakseni

hänet», lisäsi hän äreästi.
»Ja mielestänne hän näytti kalpealta ja heikolta.»
»Niin, sellainen oli minun havaintoni.»
»Ja kun hän kysyi herra Holladayta, käytti hän sanontaa 'isäni',
kuten todistuksessanne ilmoititte.»
Taas epäröi todistaja koettaen muistella.
»Ei», vastasi hän vihdoin. »Luullakseni hänen sanansa olivat:

'Onko herra Holladaylla vieraita?'»
»Ja ääni oli neiti Holladayn?»
»Sitä en minä voi sanoa», vastasi todistaja pyyhkien taas hikeä

otsaltaan. »Minulla ei ole mitään halua tarpeettomasti syyttää neiti
Holladayta. Enhän tunne edes hänen ääntänsä tarpeeksi hyvin
voidakseni vannoa siihen nähden.»
»No, kun te vastasitte hänen kysymykseensä kieltävästi, niin eikö

hän epäröinyt ennenkuin meni yksityiskonttoriin?»
»Ei, hän meni suoraan sisälle.»
»Onko ovella olemassa mitään nimikilpeä?»
»Kyllä, tavallinen 'Yksityiskonttori'.»
»Niin että jos huoneisto ei ollut hänelle tuttu, hän olisi yhtäkaikki
ymmärtänyt, mihin oli mentävä?»
»Niin, niin otaksun.»
»Ja tehän sanoitte myöskin, että ette olisi voinut kuulla mitään
sananvaihtoa yksityiskonttorista, jos sellaista olisi ollut?»
»Niin.»
»Olette tietysti ollut kauan herra Holladayn palveluksessa, herra

Rogers?»
»Yli kolmekymmentä vuotta.»
»Silloin teillä täytyy olla tiedot hänen asioistaan?»
»Täysin tarkat.»
»Oletteko koskaan näiden vuosien kuluessa tavannut jotakin —
jotakin menoerää, kirjeenvaihtoa taikka mitä muuta hyvänsä — joka
olisi johtanut teitä ajatukseen, että herra Holladayta kiristettiin tai että
hänellä olisi joskus ollut yhteyttä jonkun naisen kanssa?»
»En», vastasi todistaja. »Ei, ei! Voin vannoa, että mikään sellainen
ei ole mahdollista. Kaikella muotoa olisin saanut siitä tiedon, jos niin
olisi ollut asian laita.»
»Tässä on kylliksi tällä kertaa», sanoi Royce. »Mutta tarvitsen

luultavasti vielä kerran kutsua todistajan kuultavaksi, herra tuomari.»
Tutkintotuomari nyökäytti päätään, ja Rogers astui alas

todistajapaikalta, vieläkin vavisten mielenliikutuksensa viimeisestä
puhkeamisesta. Myönnän puolestani olleeni sitä mieltä, että olimme
ajaneet auttamattoman lujasti.
Sen jälkeen kutsuttiin esiin konttoripoika, mutta hänellä ei ollut

mitään uutta lisättävänä. Hän oli mennyt viemään postiin muutamia
kirjeitä; naisen oli täytynyt tulla konttoriin hänen poissaollessaan.
Vasta sitten kun nainen tuli taas ulos, hän oli nähnyt hänet, mutta ei
luonnollisesti hänen kasvojaan. Hän oli äskettäin saanut paikan
konttorissa eikä tuntenut neiti Holladayta.
Sitten kutsuttiin sisään lääkärit, jotka oli haettu kuolleen luo, ja he

todistivat, että veitsenterä oli tunkeutunut läpi vasemman
kaulavaltimon ja että hän oli kuollut verenvuotoon — niin,
tosiasiallisesti ollut kuollut jo ennenkuin he tulivat paikalle. Vei ehkä
kymmenen minuuttia aikaa, ennenkuin sellainen verenpaljous, jonka
Rogers oli nähnyt, oli ennättänyt virrata ulos — ainakin enemmän
kuin viisi minuuttia, jonka vuoksi piston on täytynyt tapahtua
ennenkuin nainen lähti sisemmästä konttorista.
Poliisikonstaapeli, joka kutsuttuna oli rientänyt paikalle, todisti, että
hän oli tutkinut ikkunat ja että molemmat ikkunat olivat lukitut säpeillä
sisäpuolelta, seikka, joka teki mahdottomaksi ylhäältä laskeutumisen
taikka alhaalta ylös kiipeämisen. Ei mitään ollut huoneessa
epäjärjestyksessä. — Vielä muutamia vähempiarvoisia todistuksia
kuultua kutsuttiin sisään neiti Holladayn kamarineito.
»Oliko emäntänne poissa kotoa eilen iltapäivällä?» kysyi

tutkintotuomari.
»Oli, hän käski valjastaa vaunut kello kolmeksi. Ja kohta sen

jälkeen hän lähti.»
»Mihin aikaan hän tuli takaisin?»
»Kuuden aikaan; niin että hänellä oli juuri parahiksi aikaa

pukeutua päivälliselle.»
»Huomasitteko mitään omituista hänen olennossaan, kun hän tuli

kotiin?»
Tyttö epäröi, nähtävästi peläten, että hän voisi puhua liian paljon.
»Neiti Holladay valitti päänkivistystä aamulla», sanoi hän hetken

perästä. »Hän oli huononnäköinen lähtiessään ulos, ja ajelu teki
hänet pahemmaksi. Hän näytti hyvin hermostuneelta ja sairaalta.
Neuvoin häntä paneutumaan makuulle eikä pukeutumaan
päivälliselle, mutta hän ei halunnut kuullakaan minua. Hän söi aina
päivällisen yhdessä isänsä kanssa eikä antanut hänen syödä yksin.
Hän oli hyvin kiihkeä, sillä hän pelkäsi, että herra Holladay ennättäisi
kotiin ennenkuin hän oli valmis.»
»Ja olette varma, että hän todellakin odotti häntä?»

»Kyllä, niin! Menipä hän eteiseenkin katsomaan, eikö hän jo tulisi.
Hän oli hyvin levoton isänsä suhteen.»
Tämä oli ainakin yksi meille suotuisa asia.
»Ja kun tieto hänen isänsä kuolemasta saapui, miten hän

käyttäytyi silloin?»
»Hän ei tehnyt kerrassaan mitään», vastasi kamarineiti ja veti

henkeä tukehduttaakseen nyyhkytyksen. »Hän pyörtyi. Jälkeenpäin
hän oli aivan kuin tiedotonna, kunnes lääkäri tuli.»
»Siinä kaikki. Onko teillä mitään kysyttävää todistajalta, herra

Royce?»
»Vain yksi kysymys», sanoi päällikköni nousten ylös.
Minä tiesin, mikä se oli ja pidätin henkeäni jännityksestä, sillä minä

ihmettelin oliko viisasta tehdä sitä.
»Muistatteko, millainen puku emännällänne oli eilen iltapäivällä?»

kysyi hän.
»Kyllä, hyvinkin», vastasi tyttö, ja hänen katseensa kirkastui. »Se

oli tummanpunainen, hyvin yksinkertaisesti ommeltu, ainoastaan
vähäisellä kapealla, mustalla nauhalla reunustettu.»
III
Juttu kärjistyy
Siitä henkäyksettömästä hiljaisuudesta, joka seurasi hänen

vastaustaan, kamarineiti huomasi, että hän oli jollakin tavoin antanut
emännälleen kovan iskun, ja hän puhkesi hillittömään, epätoivoiseen
nyyhkytykseen. Näin, miten päällikköni kalpeni. Hän oli lyönyt uuden
niitin ketjuun — juuri sen, jota tarvittiin pitämään sitä lujasti koossa.
Pääni meni pyörälle. Olisiko mahdollista, että tämä hieno, sivistynyt
tyttö todellakin, kun kaikki kävi ympäri, voi olla sellainen paholainen
sielultaan ja sydämeltään, että saattoi murhata… Ajoin kammolla
sellaisen ajatuksen mielestäni. Se oli alhaista, uskomatonta.
Tutkintotuomari ja yleinen syyttäjä istuivat kuiskaillen keskenään,

ja näin ensiksimainitun heittävän silmäyksen edessään pöydällä
olevaan veriseen nenäliinaan, siirtääkseen sen tämän jälkeen
todistajanpaikalla olevalle itkevälle tytölle. Tarvittiin vielä se — että
hän tunsi tuon pienen liinalapun — niin oli todistusketju täydellinen.
Tuomari epäröi hetkisen, puhui vielä muutamia sanoja Singletonille
ja ojentautui sitten tuolissaan. Ehkäpä hänen mielestään ketju jo oli
tarpeeksi vahva; taikka ehkäpä arveli hän vain, ettei todistaja ollut
sellaisessa tilassa, että olisi voitu jatkaa.
»Onko vielä mitään muuta, herra Royce?» kysyi hän.
»Ei tällä kertaa», vastasi päällikköni.
Luulen, että hän oli juuri huomaamaisillaan täydellisesti, kuinka

toivoton asiamme oli.
»Siinä tapauksessa annamme todistajan poistua toistaiseksi»,

sanoi tutkintotuomari. »Saamme luultavasti kutsua hänet sisään
sitten uudelleen.»
Tyttö vietiin melkein hysteerisessä tilassa takaisin todistajain

huoneeseen, ja Goldberg alkoi selailla pöydällään olevia papereita.
»Meillä on vielä yksi todistaja jäljellä», sanoi hän vihdoin, »neiti

Holladayn ajuri, ja kentiespä joku vastatodistajakin. Jos haluatte
aamiaislomaa, herra Royce, niin yhdyn mielelläni siihen.»
»Kiitos», sanoi päällikköni, iloisena saadessaan tilaisuuden tointua

ja valmistaa puolustussuunnitelman. »Sitä vastaan minulla ei
todellakaan ole mitään.»
»Hyvä, siis keskeytämme istunnon kello kahdeksi.»
Ja hän lykkäsi tuolinsa taaksepäin.
»Saanko sanoa pari sanaa ennenkun menette, herra tuomari?»

kysyi Royce.
»Kernaasti.»
»Haluaisin puhua neiti Holladayn kanssa muutamia minuutteja eri
huoneessa. Tahdomme luonnollisesti neuvotella
puolustautumisestamme.»
Tutkintotuomari katsoi häneen hetken jonkun verran uteliaasti.
»Annan mielelläni teille luvan tavata hänet eri huoneessa», sanoi

hän auliisti. »Olen hyvin pahoillani, ettemme voineet saada teistä
tietoa eilen illalla, jotta olisitte saanut tilaisuuden valmistautua
tutkintoon. Tunnen, ettemme tavallaan ole menetelleet teitä kohtaan
oikein, vaikka en näekään, että viivytys olisi voinut muuttaa asiain
tilaa; ja sellaisessa tapauksessa kuin tämä on hyvin tärkeätä
käsitellä asia nopeasti. Minulla ei ollut aikomusta asettaa neiti
Holladayta kuulusteltavaksi, sen vuoksi katsoin parhaaksi alkaa
tutkinnon heti. Teidän on myönnettävä, herra Royce, että asian
nykyisellä kannalla ollessa minulla on vain yksi tie avoinna.»
»Pelkään sitä», sanoi toinen surullisena. »Tapaus on aivan

käsittämätön. Todistusketju näyttää olevan ehdottomasti täydellinen,
ja kuitenkin olen vakuutettu — kuten jokaisen viisaan ihmisen täytyy
olla — että joku onneton erehdys on tapahtunut, joka, kerran
huomattuna, tulee sortamaan koko rakennelman. Minun tehtäväni on
ottaa siitä selvä.»
»Niin, ihmeellisiä asioita tapahtuu tässä maailmassa, herra

Royce», huomautti Singleton filosofisesti, kokenut kun oli.
»Mahdoton ei tapahdu koskaan!» vastasi päällikköni. »Toivon

saavani näyttää teille, että tämä asia kuuluu siihen luokkaan.»
»Minä toivon samaa», sanoi yleinen syyttäjä. »Olisin iloinen, jos

rikollisen huomattaisiin olevan joku toinen.»
»Olen tekevä parhaani», lupasi Royce. »Lester», sanoi hän
kääntyen minuun, »on parasta, että menette syömään aamiaista.
Näytätte aivan nääntyneeltä.»
»Tuonko jotakin teillekin?» kysyin minä. »Taikka, vielä parempi,

minä tilaan niin, että ruoka on valmis teille puolen tunnin kuluttua?
Meillähän on 'Rotin' tässä viereisessä kulmassa.»
Luulen, että hän olisi antanut kieltävän vastauksen, jollei

tutkintotuomari olisi sekaantunut asiaan.
»Parasta on, että lähdette, herra Royce», sanoi hän. »Te näytätte
itsekin aivan nääntyneeltä. Ehkäpä voitte houkutelia neiti
Holladaytakin syömään jotakin. Olen varma, että hän on sen
tarpeessa.»
»No niin sitten, tilatkaa aamiainen kahdelle hengelle valmiiksi

puolen tunnin kuluttua, Lester», sanoi hän. »Menen nyt neiti
Holladayn luo ja tulen sitten suoraan Rotiniin.»
Hän läksi tutkintotuomarin perässä ja minä menin hitain askelin

Rotinin ravintolaan antamaan tarpeelliset määräykset. Valitsin
pöydän hauskassa huoneen nurkassa ja otin sanomalehden, jota
koetin lukea. Sen huomattavin uutinen oli Holladayn murhaa
koskeva, ja kiehuin vihasta nähdessäni, kuinka suurella
itsetietoisuudella ja varmuudella lehti puolusti ajatusta tyttären
rikollisuudesta. Ja kuitenkin — ajattelin — voiko heitä soimata siitä?
Voiko soimata ketään ihmistä siitä, että hän uskoi tämän todistajain
kuulustelun jälkeen hänen olevan syyllisen? Mitenkä muuten oli se
mahdollista? Niin, jopa itsekin…
Ei, tämä oli hirveätä! Koetin aprikoida tyynesti löytääkseni
ulospääsyn sokkelosta. Ja kuitenkin, kuinka täydellinen olikaan
todistusketju! Ainoa etu, jonka tähän asti olimme voittaneet, oli se
että salaperäisen Holladayn luona kävijä oli kysynyt »herra
Holladayta» eikä »isäänsä» — ja mikä vähäinen etu tämäkin itse
asiassa oli! Oletetaan, että he olivat riidelleet, että heidän välilleen oli
tullut jotakin, joka edensi heidät toisistaan, eikö silloin olisi aivan
luonnollista, että hän käytti juuri näitä sanoja. Eivätkö nuo mustat
silmät, täyteläiset huulet, lämmin ulkokuori ilmaisseet, kun kaikki kävi
ympäri, voimakasta ja kiivasta luonnetta, syviä tunteita,
pikavihaisuutta? Mutta mistä voisi löytää syyn sellaiseen
katkeruuteen, sellaiseen vihollisuuteen, joka johtaa moiseen
kauheaan murhenäytelmään? Mikä oli syynä?
Silloin yhtäkkiä vaikeni minulle asia. Vain yksi peruste voi löytyä —
niin, yksi ainoa! Jos on syvät tunteet, niin voi myöskin rakastaa
kiihkeästi. Ehkäpä hän rakasti jotakuta, ehkä hän oli pitänyt hänestä
kiinni vastoin isänsä tahtoa! Tunsin hänen isänsä maineen
ankaruudestaan, kylmästä välinpitämättömyydestä tuomioissaan.
Tässä oli varmaankin selitys!
Mutta jo seuraavassa minuutissa oikaisin taas harmistuneena

ajatuksiani. Tässä istuin ja haudoin mielessäni hänen rikollisuuttaan
— koetin etsiä pohjaa hänen rikokselleen —löytää sille perustetta!
Muistin hänet sellaisena kuin olin nähnyt hänet ajelemassa isänsä
kanssa; johdattelin mieleeni monta kuulemaani kertomusta heidän
kiintymyksestään toisiaan kohtaan; ajattelin kuinka koko hänen
elämänsä, niin paljon kuin tunsin sitä, tiesi tavattoman tyyntä ja
hillittyä, hyvää ja rakastettavaa luonnetta. Ja mitä siihen tuli, että hän
olisi tehnyt rikoksen rakkaussyistä — eikö hänen silmäinsä loiste
hänen nähdessään Roycen puhunut kerta kaikkiaan sellaista
oletusta vastaan? Varmasti täytyi löytyä joku virhe todistuksissa, ja
meidän oli otettava siitä selko.
Pienellä kevennyksen huokauksella nojasin pääni takanani olevaa

seinää vasten. Millainen narri olinkaan! Luonnollisesti saisimme
asian selville. Royce oli sanonut samoin, yleinen syyttäjä oli
neuvonut tavan. Meidän tarvitsi vain todistaa alibi. Ja seuraava
todistaja tulisi sen tekemään. Hänen kyyditsijänsä tarvitsi vain
sanoa, minne oli vienyt hänet, missä paikoissa hän oli pysähtynyt, ja
kaikki olisi selvää. Aikana, jolloin rikos tapahtui, hän oli epäilemättä
ollut kaukana Wallstreetiltä! Juttu olisi siten päättynyt — ja päättynyt
ilman, että neiti Holladayn tarvitsi kärsiä ristikuulustelun vaikeaa
koetusta.
»Mitä merkillisin juttu tämä tässä», sanoi eräs ääni vieressäni, ja

kun käännyin syrjittäin, näin, että aivan minun takanani olevalla
tuolilla istui herra, joka myöskin luki kertomusta rikoksesta.
Hän pani sanomalehden pois kädestään ja katsoi minuun.
»Mitä merkillisin juttu!» toisti hän, kääntyen minuun.
Nyökäytin päätäni ja heitin häneen vain pikaisen silmäyksen, kun

olin liian paljon omissa ajatuksissani kiinnittääkseni huomiota
häneen. Sain sellaisen käsityksen, että hän oli punaposkinen,
tanakka ja hyvinpuettu mies sekä ulkomuodoltaan selvästi
ranskalainen.
»Suokaa anteeksi», sanoi hän ja kumartui hiukan eteenpäin.

»Muukalaisena tässä maassa kiintyy huomioni teidän
oikeudenkäyntilaitokseenne. Olin tänä aamuna läsnä tutkinnossa ja
näin teidät siellä. Minusta tuntui siltä kuin nuori nainen olisi —
mitenkä sanoisi — pahassa pulassa.»
Hän puhui englanninkieltä erinomaisen hyvin, ainoastaan hieman

murtaen. Silmäsin vielä kerran häntä ja näin, että hänen silmänsä
loistivat ja olivat tarkkaavasti kiintyneet minuun.
»Näyttää siltä», myönsin minä, haluamatta keskustella, vaikka en

samalla kertaa tahtonut olla epäkohtelias.
»Sitä juuri olen minä sanonut itsekseni!» jatkoi hän vilkkaasti.

»Tämä omituinen — kuinka sanoisin — sattuma pukuun nähden
esimerkiksi!»
Minä en vastannut; en ollut lainkaan sillä tuulella, että keskustelu

asiasta olisi minua huvittanut.
»Pyydän anteeksi», uudisti hän suostuttelevalla äänellä, yhä

istuen eteenpäin kumartuneena, »mutta se on asia, jonka minä
mielelläni haluaisin tietää. Jos hänet katsotaan syylliseksi, niin mitä
sitten tapahtuu?»
»Siinä tapauksessa hänet luovutetaan rikosasiain oikeudelle»,

selitin minä.
»Se tahtoo sanoa, hänet pannaan vankeuteen?»
»Tietysti.»
»Mutta jos olen ymmärtänyt teidän lakinne oikein, voidaan hänet

päästää vapauteen takausta vastaan?»
»Ei henkirikosasioissa», vastasin minä; »ei sellaisessa
tapauksessa kuin tämä, jolloin tuomiona saattaa olla
kuolemanrangaistus.»
»Vai niin, minä ymmärrän», sanoi hän ja nyökäytti päätään

hitaasti. »Häntä ei siis vapauteta ennenkuin syyttömyytensä on
todistettu? Ja kuinka kauan siihen kuluisi?»
»Sitä on mahdoton sanoa — kuusi- kuukautta — vuosi kenties.»
»Vai niin, minä ymmärrän», sanoi hän taas ja tyhjensi lasin

absinttia, jonka ääressä hän oli istunut ja leikkinyt, »kiitos
selityksestänne.»
Hän nousi ja meni hitain askelin ulos, ja minä tarkkasin tuota

vahvarakenteista vartaloa ja lyhyttä, paksua kaulaa.
Samassa tuli tarjoilija tuoden voileipiä, yhtäkkiä huomasin, että

puoli tuntia jo kauan sitten oli kulunut. Odotin vielä turhaan
neljännestunnin Roycea; sitten söin, otin eväsrasian kainalooni ja
kiiruhdin takaisin tutkintotuomarin luo. Astuttuani sisään sain nähdä
kokoonvaipuneen olennon istumassa pöydän ääressä, ja rohkeuteni
lannistui, kun tunsin hänessä päällikköni. Koko hänen olentonsa
ilmaisi täydellistä epätoivoa.
»Olen ottanut mukaani vähän aamiaista teille, Royce», sanoin niin

iloisena kuin voin. »Asian käsittely alkaa puolen tunnin kuluttua,
parasta on, että syötte vähän.»
Ja minä avasin rasian. Hän katsoi siihen hetkisen ja alkoi sitten

konemaisesti syödä.

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Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the

Dutch Republic, 1660-1710 Jetze

Spinoza and Biblical

For Lieven and Maria

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction: Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic 1

Kuyper’s Systematic Theology 105

5. The Sabbath: Biblical Scholarship and Ecclesiastical Discipline 227

A Note about Proper Names

2 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

rabbis had come close to discarding the book of Ezekiel, considering it

EARLY MODERN BIBLICAL PHILOLO GY

Spinoza employed philology, including textual criticism, linguistic knowledge,

4 Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (Hamburg [i.e. Amsterdam]: H. Künraht

philological project consisted of Valla’s annotations to the New Testament,

4 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

c­ ontradictory passages. In the confessional struggles that followed the consoli-

6 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism

The Tractatus theologico-politicus is Spinoza’s most important work of biblical

15 See chapter 1 for extensive historiography concerning Spinoza’s biblical criticism.

­ on-biblical sources (Spinoza’s demonstration of the impossibility of events

19 L. Strauss, ‘How to Study Spinoza’s “Theologico-Political Treatise”’, Proceedings of the

8 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

man: awareness of humankind’s cognitive limitations, which prohibited taking

Criticism Philosophical and Philological

23 S. James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise

26 Cfr. Bod, A New History of the Humanities, 16.

10 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

that differed completely from most of his predecessors and contemporaries.

on autonomous thinking and personal verification. Bernier casts the French

35 ‘Méthode critique’ and ‘approche critique’: J. Bernier, La critique du Pentateuque de Hobbes

12 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

were dependent on the authenticity and intelligibility of the biblical texts,

The Bible in the Dutch Reformed Church

The Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century offered ample opportunity

attention from ecclesiastical historians—to the detriment of the remainder of

14 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

theologians and philosophers who took an interest in Cartesian method in

43 Van Eijnatten and Van Lieburg, Nederlandse religiegeschiedenis, 210–27.

47 J. S. Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge

16 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

c­ ontributes to understanding how outsiders’ assertions concerning the Bible

first half of the seventeenth century, various centralized projects of translation

CONCEPTS AND METHOD

52 Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, 1–25.

18 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

of the unifying term ‘biblical philology’, which denotes, somewhat artificially,

54 Popkin, ‘Spinoza and Bible Scholarship’, 397. 55 Bernier, La critique du Pentateuque.

20 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

studies, and historical contextualization. The term accommodates such varied

By examining the way leading members of the Dutch Reformed Church

endangered confessional consensus. Debates concerning the historical specifi-

22 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

seventeenth-century term scripturarius. Both Jacobus Alting and Johannes

24 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

Sources: Treatises, Pamphlets, Minutes

73 G. Groenhuis, De predikanten: de sociale positie van de gereformeerde predikanten in de

74 K. O. Meinsma, Spinoza en zĳn kring: historisch-kritische studiën over Hollandsche vrĳgeesten

26 Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–1710

Starting from the Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza’s outstanding work

Tunsin pikemmin kuin kuulin sen hiljaisen kohahduksen, joka kävi

»Palatkaamme nyt vielä hetkiseksi taaksepäin», sanoi

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction: Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic 1

Kuyper’s Systematic Theology 105

5. The Sabbath: Biblical Scholarship and Ecclesiastical Discipline 227

c ontradictory passages. In the confessional struggles that followed the consoli-

on-biblical sources (Spinoza’s demonstration of the impossibility of events

c ontributes to understanding how outsiders’ assertions concerning the Bible