Eric Nelson tackles a particularly entrenched historiographical commonplace, one that envisions the rise of modern political thought in western democracies as the consequence of a process of secularisation beginning in the sixteenth and accelerating in the seventeenth century that increasingly excluded religious arguments from political discourse. Nelson turns this traditional narrative on its head, arguing instead that political thought in early modern Europe became more, not less, secular and that this process was fuelled by the engagement of Christian scholars with Hebrew sources. It was in the ‘biblical’ seventeenth century that a political theology firmly in the mainstream of European intellectual life followed the Renaissance call ad fontes and the Protestant preoccupation with the biblical text to seek out God's constitutional preferences as revealed in Scripture. The exploration of the Bible as a political constitution was facilitated by the revival of Hebrew learning in the Republic of Letters that opened up a wealth of rabbinic materials. Nelson elaborates and sustains three specific arguments. Firstly, from the middle of the seventeenth century republican writers changed tack from arguing that republicanism was the most preferable form of legitimate constitution to making the case that it was the only legitimate form and that monarchy was illicit; this ‘rupture’, Nelson argues, ‘was provoked by the Protestant reception of a radical tradition of rabbinic biblical exegesis, which understood the Israelite request for a king in 1 Samuel as an instance of the sin of idolatry’ (p. 3). Furthermore, at the same time republican writers abandoned the orthodoxy learned from Roman example that a free state ought not to use its coercive powers to redistribute wealth – a host of ancient authorities including Livy and Cicero blamed the misguided agrarian laws for the fall of the Roman republic – to placing redistribution at the centre of their politics; this transformation was prompted by ‘the meditation on Biblical land law – seen through the prism of rabbinic commentaries’ (p. 4). The third dimension to Nelson's argument deals with the relationship between Church and State and engages with the well-worn issue of religious toleration in early modern Europe. Here Nelson argues that toleration was nurtured by the presence not absence of deeply-felt religious convictions, and that it emerged out of an erastian attempt to unify not separate Church and State; the Hebrew revival played a crucial role here in the formulation of the argument that God's own republic of the Hebrews was an erastian and tolerant one. Nelson's carefully targeted arguments are well-supported and persuasive, though his subtle reading of Hobbes as an advocate for toleration will not convince all readers. My only criticism is that Nelson, in an engaging but slender volume, does not engage in more substantive detail with the dominant historiographical tradition that he is challenging, only mentioning in an endnote Mark Lilla's The stillborn God and the growing oeuvre of Jonathan Israel. Much more could have been said, and needs to be said, on this score.