1 The curing of a disease by the influence of the healer’s mind on the patient’s.

2 “Hebrew Bible” refers to the “Old Testament” of Christianity. As mentioned, this was Charles Briggs’s specialty and the focus of his speech, as it is the focus of this book. Unless otherwise indicated, the word “Bible” alone herein refers to the Hebrew Bible.

3 Before the Common Era (= BC)

4 Judah (Hebrew: yehuda) is the name of the southern part of the land of Israel. The same territory was called Judea by ancient Greeks and Romans, and this name is also sometimes used nowadays. Its inhabitants were called yehudim in Hebrew, and this became the English word “Jews.”

5 Parchment and papyrus disintegrate fairly quickly under normal climatic conditions. Thus, in order to have survived, all but the latest parts of the Bible would have had to be recopied numerous times within the biblical period. If such effort was expended, it certainly must not have been done in vain—the texts must have had some role in society, in people’s daily lives.

6 A trove of ancient manuscripts first discovered in 1948 near the shores of the Dead Sea. The manuscripts, many of which go back to the third and second centuries BCE, include numerous texts that interpret the Bible or otherwise reflect then-current interpretations.

7 Books written toward the end of the biblical period but ultimately excluded from the Jewish biblical canon. They include such works as the book of Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the book of Jubilees.

8 Hebrew has no verb “to be” in the present tense; thus, this sentence would be the same whether or not the word “is” is supplied in translation.

9 “Interpretation” is probably the best one-word translation of this Hebrew word, but midrash had a particular connotation: it was non-obvious interpretation. Any fool could tell you that God had tested Abraham; it took a skilled interpreter to show what words in the text hinted at why He had wanted to, as well as at Isaac’s willing participation in the episode.

10 I have mentioned this assumption last to avoid giving the impression that the other three are a natural by-product of the fourth. Actually, there is no reason to assume that a divinely given text ought to be cryptic, for example—on the contrary, would not God want His words to be easily understood by all? Moreover, while the first three assumptions are amply attested among the earliest of the ancient interpreters, that is not necessarily true of the fourth.

11 This is not quite allegory in the way Philo used the term, concrete-for-abstract, but more in the way Paul used the term allegory in Gal. 4:24, where it is closer to typology, that is, the earlier refers to the later, or the Old Testament refers to the New.

12 Here Spinoza is assuming, for the sake of argument, that Moses is indeed the author of the entire Pentateuch.

13 An important point for Spinoza, since Maimonides and later Jewish thinkers specifically denied that the Torah attributes emotions to God, and that any mention of God being angry or pleased or the like is simply intended to make things comprehensible in human terms.

14 This word is plural in form and is often used as a plural to refer to the deities of other nations, “foreign gods.” When it is used of Israel’s God it is construed as singular: “’elohim says,” “’elohim does,” and so forth.

15 Since, even in biblical times, this name came to be considered too sacred to be uttered, its exact pronunciation has been lost; as with other words, scribes had no way of indicating the internal vowels when they wrote this name. For a time, Christian Hebraists believed the proper pronunciation was “Jehovah,” since those vowels corresponded to the vowel dots that had been written in later by Jewish scholars. Eventually, however, it became clear that those vowel dots actually belonged to the Hebrew word for “My Lord” (’adonay) and had been written in to remind readers to substitute the word “My Lord” for this ineffable name.

16 In today’s English: scientific objectivity.

17 “Knowing good and evil” might also be translated as “knowing all things,” that is, the tree confers wisdom and knowledge.

18 See above, chapter 1.

19 In ancient times, Satan was often described as a wicked angel; indeed, he had different angel-type names (names with the suffix -el): Sammael, Gadriel, Satanel, and so forth.

20 The letter q in transcriptions of Hebrew (as well as Arabic and other Semitic languages) represents a sound similar to that of k in English, but articulated at the very back of the mouth (not on the roof of the mouth, like k).

21 As Gunkel and others have pointed out, this is true of numerous references to a group of descendants by the name of their founder or eponym. “Cursed be Canaan,” Noah says of his grandson, “let him be the lowest of slaves to his brothers”—but these words apply not to Canaan, the young boy standing before him, but to the whole future Canaanite nation. So similarly, Balaam addresses “the Kenite” or “Cain” indiscriminately in Num. 24:21, but by either name this individual designates the whole nation of his descendants (Cain is by then long dead). The instructions in Leviticus that “Aaron” do this or that likewise refer to his descendants, the Aaronide priesthood, or, sometimes, to any future high priest. Examples could be multiplied.

22 If so, modern scholars would say, the tale of Cain actually reverses the historic reality—the religion of this God is said by the story to have moved from Israel’s land southward, whereas the evidence, archaeological and biblical, suggests an opposite migration.

23 Chapters 1–11 of Genesis, known to scholars as the “Primeval History,” appear to be a discrete unit designed as a preface to the more focused “Ancestral History” of Genesis 12–50.

24 Abraham’s original name, before God changed it; see Gen. 17:5.

25 That is, Noah.

26 Note, “the LORD” and no longer the three men.

27 An allusion to Gen. 22:12 and 17, both of which say that Abraham did not “spare” his only son.

28 Inhabitants of New England may recall the Old Man of the Mountain, a humanlike profile that used to be visible on a mountainside near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. (It collapsed in 2003.) This rock formation also led to the making of a tale, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face.”

29 Fourteen years for the two brides, and then another six for payment (Gen. 30:28–34).

30 The Merneptah (or Merenptah) stele, dated to ca. 1207 BCE; see below, chapter 22.

31 To this day, the laws of kosher food require that sciatic nerve (that is, the “thigh muscle that is on the socket of the hip”) be removed from the body of any animal other than a bird before it can be deemed fit for consumption.

32 A play on the name Judah (yehudah), which sounds like “let them praise you” (yodukha).

33 The name of a somewhat later form of ancient Egyptian and the script used to write it, which came into use around 650 BCE.

34 Below, chapter 22.

35 Here, in common with other ancient sources, it is not God who “tried to kill” Moses—since, if He had tried, He surely would have succeeded—but an angel.

36 Or, according to the variant reading of the Old Greek translation of the Bible, The Book of Song (that is, not y-sh-r, but sh-y-r).

37 The word translated as “serve” here (‘abad) is the same as that regularly used for “worship.” The implication is thus that, since God is ultimately responsible for having placed parents over a person, serving them is thus a form of respecting God’s will, indeed, of worshiping Him.

38 If this is so, however, then according to the numbering followed by most Christians, one would be left with nine commandments. To get back to the original figure of ten, Christians would either have to consider the prologue (“I am the LORD your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage”) as an actual commandment, in keeping with the Jewish view, or subdivide the last commandment, not to covet a neighbor’s wife or house or other possessions, into two separate prohibitions.

39 That is, a free person, whether man, woman, or child, as opposed to members of the two lower classes, commoners and slaves.

40 Literally, “to go before us.”

41 See above, opening section of chapter 17.

42 In point of fact, Deuteronomy is the only book that appears to be attributed almost entirely to the authorship of Moses (Deut. 1:1; 31:9); Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers quote God’s words to Moses but say nothing about the overall authorship of the book.

43 The English word “man” used to mean, among other things, “husband” (like its German cognate Mann). This meaning basically died out long ago, but it did survive in the liturgical formula, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” (“Wife” [wif], incidentally, has also changed: in Old English it also meant “woman.” This meaning, too, has been lost, save for a few frozen expressions [“old wives’ tale”] and some compounds [fishwife, midwife]. “I now pronounce you man and wife” thus originally had a double symmetry about it.)

44 Hezekiah, Josiah’s grandfather, had made some moves in the direction of centralizing worship in Jerusalem, destroying the “high places” at which animals were sacrificed (see 2 Kings 18:4; 22)—but apparently these were ineffective or subsequently overthrown.

45 And indeed, the two holidays are treated quite separately, seriatim, in Exod. 12:1–13, 14–20, 21–28, 40–51; see also Lev. 23:5, 6–8 and Num. 28:16, 17–23.

46 Literally, “it will be for you as a tassel.” But we already knew that! Apparently, a pun is intended, connecting the word for tassel (iit) with the root for “peep” or “peer” (u).

47 In other words, let me be judged to have led a righteous life, so that, as a reward, I will have offspring as numerous as Israel is now. The word for “righteous” (yesharim) may be an allusion to Israel’s poetic name, Jeshurun.

48 As is frequently observed, mishneh torah in Deut. 17:18 actually means a “version” or “copy” of the Torah; “repetition of the law” is probably thus a willful distortion.

49 The Urim and Thummim were a priestly instrument of divination (Exod. 28:30; Lev. 8:8; Num. 27:21; 1 Sam. 14:41–42, and so forth).

50 Oreb is Mount Horeb; its top is “secret” because its precise location is unknown. Sinai, as we have seen, is apparently another name for God’s mountain. That Shepherd is Moses, who was caring for Jethro’s flock when he met God at the burning bush; he taught in the Beginning (the first words of the Pentateuch, as well as the rabbinic name for the book of Genesis) about the creation of the Heav’ns and Earth.

51 “Hundred-year-old prophet, surrounded with honor, Moses had gone off to find the Lord.”

52 Many scholars believe that the sole hero of the original version was Caleb. Note thus Num. 14:24, where Caleb alone is mentioned as having a “different spirit.” Deut. 1:36 asserts that Caleb alone of his whole generation will see the land of Canaan.

53 That is to say, 600,000 adult males plus their wives and children.

54 See next chapter.

55 “Spread your cloak” is a bit of a pun, since it also means “protect me.” As a relative of Naomi’s, Boaz has the right to “redeem” or reclaim Ruth and take her as his wife.

56 Some translations of this verse read, “more blessed than women in tents.” But this apparent comparative is (as often in Hebrew) actually a superlative (cf. Deut. 33:24—the same grammatical construction—translated as “Most blessed of sons be Asher”). The point is certainly not to imply that Jael is something other than a “woman in tents,” since in the story that is clearly what she is.

57 As explained earlier, these are the consonants of this deity’s proper name; fitting in the vowels is still something of a guess.

58 For modern scholars, these “heavenly beings” are the lesser gods of the divine council, the same “council of the holy ones” mentioned in the next clause. See below, chapter 30.

59 The general name for the language of Babylon, Assyria, and other regions.

60 Compare with English, where “God” (capital G) refers to a specific deity, our Supreme Being, while “god” can refer to any deity—the Roman gods, the god of war, and so forth.

61 Note that the book of Judges reports on such an apparent migration: “The descendants of Hobab the Kenite, Moses’ father-in-law, went up with the people of Judah from the city of palms [Jericho] into the wilderness of Judah, which lies in the Negeb near Arad” (Judg. 1:16).

62 “Onomasticon” is a scholars’ word for a corpus of names—in our case, all the proper names found in the Bible.

63 See above, chapter 23, “Samson.”

64 Daniel is usually classified as a fourth “major” prophet in Christian Bibles.

65 This term is used of prophets whose words are recorded in biblical books—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so forth—as opposed to prophets like Elijah and Elisha, whose words were never set down in separate collections.

66 Indeed, Samuel is specifically said to have acted as a “judge” in Israel in 1 Sam. 7:6, 15 and to have appointed his sons as judges after him (1 Sam. 8:1–3).

67 Samuel may be quoting some well-known oracle or proverb, or perhaps propounding one of his own.

68 So, for example, the Davidic king Rehoboam is called “O David” in 1 Kings 12:6.

69 Indeed, historians say, that may be why he was chosen—less chance of the king’s tribe becoming all-powerful.

70 Also known as Ishbaal. The latter name contains the divine name “Baal” and may thus have been replaced by Ishboshet as a euphemism (cf. Saul’s other son, Mephiboshet, 2 Sam. 21:8–9), though this is not certain.

71 Indeed, the first words out of the northerners’ mouths were, “Look, we are your bone and flesh.” But this, scholars say, only highlights the incongruity of their request: their own “bone and flesh” was precisely what David was not—he was from a different tribe in a different region with very different strategic interests.

72 This detail is added to imply that not only was Bathsheba in a state of ritual purity when she slept with David, but also that the child born of this union was indeed David’s and not Uriah’s.

73 Soldiers on a sacred mission were expected to refrain from sexual contact; see 1 Sam. 21:5.

74 The point is that such ornamented robes (the phrase is the same used of Joseph’s “coat of many colors” in Gen. 37:3) were quite costly; ripping hers—as a conventional sign of grief, as well as perhaps a sign that she was no longer one of the “king’s virgin daughters”—was no casual act.

75 Another sign of grief, along with putting ashes on the head.

76 Not, as one might have supposed, because he was buttonholing people outside of court, but because his planned revolt is said to have won the approval of Ahitophel, who then convinced the “elders of Israel”—understood as meaning specifically the judges of the court. “The advice pleased Absalom and all the elders of Israel” (2 Sam. 17:4).

77 The fact that Adonijah is older might make him the heir presumptive to the throne. The rest of this sentence seems to have been garbled in transmission—the bracketed phrase is not in the received text.

78 Because 1 Kings 1:4 had specified that “the king was not intimate with her.”

79 Jerome is interpreting the name as “my father increased [wisdom].”

80 Thus proverbs are like goads or nails in Eccles. 12:11; see also Deut. 28:37;1 Kings 9:7.

81 Although the text is today divided into nine chapters, this division, like all chapter divisions, was made long after the text itself was written. Proponents of this analysis see seven blocks of text here.

82 The contrast here is not simply between the wise and the foolish, but between “heart” and “mouth.” In the world of wisdom literature, the search for true knowledge is always internal, deep inside a person, whereas the pursuit of foolishness (unrestrained excess) is always flashy and superficial.

83 The term hebel was translated into Latin as vanitas and from there to English as “vanity.” But hebel does not mean “emptiness” (the meaning of vanitas) and certainly not vainglory or narcissism (that is, our “vanity”). In Ecclesiastes hebel (which elsewhere means “vapor” or “breath”) actually has a wide range of meanings. Sometimes it designates something fleeting or elusive (like a breath), sometimes “futility,” sometimes a thing of baffling unfairness or injustice.

84 That is, “O northern tribes [= Israel], return home [to rule yourselves]”—withdraw from your union with the south.

85 Indeed, the Kingdom of Judah was almost immediately attacked. 1 Kings 14:25–27 reports on an invasion by the Egyptian king Shishak (Shoshenq): “In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, King Shishak of Egypt came up against Jerusalem. He took away the treasury of the LORD’s temple and the treasury of the king’s palace; [in fact,] he took everything. He even took away all the golden shields that Solomon had amassed, so King Rehoboam had shields of bronze made in place of them.” This report is actually paralleled by that of an ancient Egyptian account of the same events discovered in a temple at Karnak (Thebes). Cf. 2 Chr. 12:2–10.

86 On Baal and the Canaanite pantheon, see above, chapter 24.

87 Most of the others had been killed by Jezebel, though Elijah may be exaggerating a little; see 1 Kings 18:4.

88 A Moabite god.

89 Omri’s son was Ahab. According to the biblical account, however, Mesha rebelled only after Ahab’s death (2 Kings 1:1; 3:5). It is possible that the inscription intends “son” in the sense of descendant, since according to the biblical account it was against Omri’s grandson Jehoram that Mesha rebelled.

90 These creatures derive from a different biblical vision of God’s throne, that found in chapter 1 of Ezekiel; see below, chapter 32.

91 The root qbl, meaning to “face” or to “receive,” seems to imply some act of coordination or harmony.

92 The text does not say “one seraph to another,” but simply “one to another.” Jerome interprets this as meaning one testament to the other, the Old to the New and the New to the Old.

93 Assyria’s regional ascendancy might properly be said to go back to the time of Elijah and Ahab (Ahab ascended the throne of Israel in 872 BCE). The Assyrian king at this time, Assurnasirpal II (884–859 BCE), was a skilled fighter who stomped through the neighboring kingdoms of northern Mesopotamia and then, by his own account, “seized the entire extent of the Lebanon mountain and reached the Great Sea [the Mediterranean] of the Amurru country. [Then] I washed my weapons in the deep sea and performed sheep-offerings to [all] the gods.” His son, Shalmaneser III (859–824 BCE), fought a series of campaigns in Syria, where he encountered a coalition of armies to oppose him, including troops contributed by Ahab. While Shalmaneser’s success was not total—he apparently failed to conquer Damascus—he did receive tribute from other nations, including Israel (then ruled by King Jehu), thus establishing Assyria as the preeminent power in the region. Assyrian power then waned for a period of about forty years, until the rise of King Tiglath-pileser III in 744 BCE, the period of Isaiah’s prophesying.

94 Pekah, son of Remaliah; omitting his first name (“son of Remaliah”) was considered a sign of disrespect.

95 Capital.

96 The Hebrew idiom means literally, “by the time he knows to reject the bad and choose the good.”

97 True, a prophet might know in advance that the child would be a boy, but why would he say “Behold!” unless he were talking to another prophet?

98 That is, a member of the royal line of David, whose father was Jesse.

99 This was the position of, for example, the Christian Marcion of Sinope (ca. 110–160 CE), ultimately condemned as a heretic and excommunicated in 144 CE.

100 Biblical books often stress that the prophet did not seek out the office. Thus, Moses is said to have offered one lame excuse after the next in trying to refuse God’s summons, finally murmuring, “Please, Lord, send someone else!” (Exod. 4:13). Similarly, as just mentioned, Samuel was so little seeking the job that he mistook God’s voice for Eli’s. Isaiah thought his “impure lips” made him unfit. Apparently these “call narratives” all stressed the prophet’s reluctance because no ancient Israelite would have wanted a self-promoter for the job. In this sense, the summons to be a prophet was not very different from the summons to be a shofet in the period of the Judges—witness in particular the “call” of Gideon (Judg. 6:11–22)—whereby an utterly unlikely candidate is transformed by the “spirit of the LORD” into a divine representative. (Or, as a modern scholar might prefer to say, the very idea of the shofet was a Deuteronomistic retrojection of the divinely selected leader—both prophet and king—back to the days before either of these offices was a fixture in Israelite society.)

101 the churches Organs: the prophets were the church’s instruments, both in the musical sense and as the means (instruments) by which the church propagated its teachings; which made of two . . . that is, their prophecies united the Old and New Testaments without, however, confusing (confounding) them; in rhythmique feet, without using a precise, classical-style meter.

102 The point is made even more sharply in Hebrew, where both “master” and “owner” can be used to refer to God.

103 Most modern translations of this passage read “Israel was holy to the LORD, the firstfruits of His harvest,” and they likewise construe the other verbs in the past tense. In so doing, these translations seek to understand Jeremiah’s words in the context of the somewhat gloomy passage that follows. But there is no reason, grammatical or otherwise, to read these as past-tense verbs: what Jeremiah is saying here is an altogether positive prophecy (and apparently intended to contrast with the next passage in the book).

104 See, among many others in Deuteronomy alone, “the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow,” Deut. 14:29; 16:11, 14; 24:19, 20, 21; etc.; “follow other gods,” Deut. 11:28; 28:14; “the land that I gave to your fathers,” Deut. 1:35; 7:8; 19:8 (and many more with “swore to/swore to give to your fathers”); “establish[ed] My name,” Deut. 12:11; 14:23; 16:2, 6, 11; etc.

105 The priest who is said to have discovered the scroll was Hilkiah (2 Kings 22:8). It is not clear if this is the same Hilkiah who is listed as Jeremiah’s own father (Jer. 1:1).

106 That is, as a member of the people of Israel, Jeremiah belongs to God (a frequent theme in Deuteronomy). For this expression, see Isa. 4:1.

107 Perhaps a “failing spring” (akzab) in the sense that what God has told Jeremiah did not always prove to be the truth but was a lie or disappointment (kazab); sometimes, indeed, no words flowed at all.

108 A general name for Syria-Palestine.

109 King Jehoiakim had died (was assassinated?) before the Babylonians’ reentry into the region, and his son, the eighteen-year-old Jehoiachin, took his place. Nebuchadnezzar then replaced Jehoiachin with the young king’s uncle, Zedekiah.

110 Many Bible translations use the abbreviated form Gemariah for Gemaryahu, but the latter is what actually appears in the Hebrew Bible—and on the seal.

111 “Torah” here does not, most scholars would point out, refer to the completed Pentateuch, but is a general term for divine instruction, as well as, more specifically, for the legal core of the book of Deuteronomy.

112 The slight hint of condescension in these translations is meant to convey the tone implied not only by the mere fact of a superhuman and immortal deity referring to His addressee as a human or mortal, but moreover by the very form ben-adam. This sounds like the standard patronymic or “last name” in Hebrew, “son-of-So-and-So.” To call someone by his patronymic alone—“son of Jesse,” for example, instead of “David” or “David son of Jesse”—was, as we have seen, a somewhat condescending, even insulting, form of reference.

113 The same Hebrew word means “breath,” “wind,” and “spirit.” All three meanings are evoked throughout this passage.

114 The place where a lover might lean his head or where a woman might hang a little clasp of sweet-scented myrrh (for both: Song 1:13).

115 The lion as emblematic of Assyria is found as well in Assyrian literary sources, though not in its plastic iconography.

116 For example, the disagreements discussed earlier between the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 and the narrative in Judges 4, or the fact that Hannah is not the “mother of seven” as her song maintains (1 Sam. 2:6), and that this song has, apart from that verse, no apparent connection with its alleged subject, the birth of a child.

117 This is not yet the devil, the Satan of later Judaism and Christianity who is God’s opponent and the embodiment of evil, but merely one of the heavenly attendants, the “sons of God.” The Hebrew n means “accuser” or “adversary.”

118 “Malachi” may not be the prophet’s name at all, but simply a reference to him (mal’aki means “my envoy”; the same word occurs in Zech. 1:9, 11 as a reference to the prophet). For this and other reasons, scholars connect the book of Malachi with that of Zechariah—either the two were at one point a single book that was divided to arrive at the round number of twelve books in the Scroll of the Twelve, or at some point “Malachi”—presumably a collection of anonymous oracles—was appended to make twelve.

119 According to the Jewish canon; the biblical apocrypha or deutero-canonical books of Christian Bibles contain some slightly later works.

120 That is to say, the Hebrew Bible of Judaism. For Christians, the events of the New Testament are also in the “biblical period.” Some Christian scholars therefore refer to the final two centuries BCE as the “intertestamental period,” the time between the completion of the Old and the beginning of the New Testaments. But this name bespeaks a solely Christian point of view, so today many scholars prefer to refer to this time as part of the “Second Temple period,” that is, up until the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in 70 CE.

121 The italics are Briggs’s.