There is no such thing as ‘the Enlightenment Bible’ quite apart from the problem of what is meant by the Enlightenment. The author defines ‘Enlightenment’ as ‘the new constellation of practices and institutions – including scholarship and scholarly techniques, translation, book reviews, salons, academies, new communication tools, and new or revived techniques of data organisation and storage – that the eighteenth century used to address a [sic] the host of religious, historical, and philosophical questions inherited from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution’ (pp. xi–xii). This understanding of the Enlightenment, were it to be applied to biblical scholarship, would be most valuable. What part was played in the development of biblical scholarship by the fact that academic theological journals such as the Allgemeine Bibliothek der biblischen Litteratur were founded in the eighteenth century, primarily in Germany? What part was played by the fact that scholars such as Robert Lowth, Benjamin Kennicott, Johann David Michaelis and Charles François Houbigant corresponded with each other? How important was it that Germany possessed something like twenty theological faculties in the eighteenth century when England was largely dependent upon Oxbridge and a handful of dissenting academies? What libraries existed, what did they collect and how widespread was access to them?

Questions such as these are barely touched upon, and what is presented is a ‘top-down’, somewhat encyclopaedic account of various aspects of eighteenth-century biblical scholarship, grouped under various headings including Religion, Philology, Pedagogy, Poetry and History. The account is detailed and based upon wide reading, although its style is sometimes allusive, and reminiscent of something addressed to examiners who are assumed to know more than the writer, rather than to readers who are assumed to know less. The account charts the role of Pietism in helping to break the link between theology and biblical studies, describes the impact of textual criticism upon translation and theological cruces, and details the use of the Bible in education given the moral difficulties it contains. A chapter on the (re)discovery of Hebrew poetry and the appreciation of the Old Testament as a national epic is followed by the paradoxical results of research into the history and customs of the Old Testament, research that greatly enlarged the gulf between the biblical text and eighteenth-century readers. Two points are well made. The first is that Christian scholars had to walk a fine line between their judgement being swayed by a latent anti-Judaism in their treatment of the Old Testament, and by the need to maintain the authoritative nature of the biblical text. The second is that the eighteenth century produced a proliferation of Bibles in the sense that differing translations based upon different methods of textual criticism could be approached from varying angles insofar as they were seen as poetic compositions, historical archives or resources of moral and political authority, to name only some possibilities.

The book contains a part iii that deals in less than forty pages with ‘The Bible in Germany, 1790–1830’, and ‘Culture and the Bible in England, 1780–1880’. Perhaps the charitable thing to say is that the publishers must have asked the author to add these sections at the last minute and that he did not have the opportunity to do the research for them that he had been able to devote to the major part of the book. They are unsatisfactory and mar what is otherwise a painstaking piece of scholarship, although one that lacks a bibliography.