In Chapter 7 of the Theological-Political Treatise Spinoza indicates that one requirement for interpreting Scripture is a knowledge of its language, and with regard to the Hebrew Bible, that means a knowledge of Hebrew grammar and more. In fact, Spinoza studied Hebrew all his life and was acquainted with traditional Jewish commentaries on biblical Hebrew as well as grammars of biblical Hebrew and classical Latin, including the famous grammar by J. Buxtorf (the Thesaurus Grammaticus Linguae Sanctae Hebraeae of 1620) and those by his teachers R. Saul Morteira and R. Mannaseh ben Israel. Probably about the time Spinoza was completing the TTP (1669–1671), he began work on his own Hebrew grammar, a work that remained unfinished at his death. In their introduction to the Opera Posthuma, Lodewijk Meyer and Johan Bouwmeester explain that Spinoza began the grammar “at the request of some of his friends who very much studied the holy language,” among whom was surely Meyer himself, the author of a famous Dutch dictionary and of Philosophia sacrae scripturae interpres (Philosophy the Interpreter of Scripture), a controversial treatise published a few years earlier (in 1666). Like some of his close associates, then, Spinoza deserves to be called a philologist and grammatical scholar as well as a philosopher and a scientist.
In the TTP Spinoza approaches religion and the Bible as a social scientist, and in that work and in the later Political Treatise, his discussion of the state and politics is also from a naturalistic point of view. The Hebrew Grammar reveals the same spirit. The Bible may be Spinoza’s only evidence for Hebrew as a spoken, natural language used by Jews in biblical antiquity, but his goal is not to reveal the language’s character as a sacred or mysterious system. Rather it is to understand its structure as a living language. His is a work “for those who desire to speak Hebrew, and not just chant it.”
Spinoza intended the grammar to have two parts. Part I was to set out the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to lay out the forms of verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech. Of special interest here were conjugations, declensions, vocalization, and so forth. Part II would then give an account of sentence structure, syntax, and so forth. Spinoza completed thirty-three chapters of Part I and none of Part II.
The grammar, while indebted to the work of medieval commentators like David Kimchi and recent grammarians like Buxtorf, is rather distinctive. Spinoza uses Latin as a model and so forces Hebrew into a Latinate pattern, with conjugations, declensions, and other structures akin to those found in an inflected language. He also treats Hebrew as a noun-based language, a peculiarity given the standard tendency to focus on Hebrew’s verbal character and the centrality of the triliteral root in Hebrew grammar. It is likely that Spinoza’s grammatical enquiry, then, mirrors the commitments of his philosophical thinking overall. It is guided, on the one hand, by his scientific naturalism and, on the other, by his commitment to a priori reasoning akin to that found in geometry—or, in this case, in Latin, viewed by him as reflecting a pure, a priori structure.
M.L.M.