By combining an analysis of Spinoza's philological criticism of the Hebrew Bible in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP; 1670) with outstanding research on the Dutch Reformed context in which it was received in the later seventeenth century, this monograph breaks new ground on both fronts and is more than the sum of its parts. Its principal achievement is to connect the erudite world of linguistically sophisticated Hebrew Bible scholars in the Dutch Republic to the contested politics and socio-ecclesial practices of the Dutch Reformed Church in the decades before and after the invasion of 1672. Spinoza's TTP thus appears not as a sui generis bolt-from-the-blue but as a text that contributed diversely to religiously and politically sensitive intellectual inquiries already underway. Together with the recent monograph by Dirk van Miert, The Emancipation of Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic (1590–1670) (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the collection of essays coedited by van Miert and Henk Nellen, Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age: God's Word Questioned (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jetze Touber's book underscores the importance of the United Provinces for the emergence of a historically critical, philologically sophisticated understanding of the Bible during decades when Dutch Reformed confessional rigidity itself precipitated less confessional approaches to scripture.

Touber's book is organized in five chapters, preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion. In place of a dichotomous intellectual tug-of-war between seventeenth-century Reformed “dogmatists” and opposed “rationalists,” Touber weaves throughout his analysis a “triangular” model that includes these two types of biblical interpreters and “scripturarians” (from scripturarius): those scholars who thought ongoing biblical scholarship of scripture in its original languages remained essential to Reformed Protestantism. For all their differences with Spinoza, on this point scripturarians overlapped with him. Structurally, the book begins with Spinoza's TTP (chapter 1) and moves outward, into the published treatises and correspondence of Dutch biblical scholars, theologians, and philosophers (chapter 2–3), and then more broadly into sources that include archival documents to explore “the social effects of biblical criticism” (24) and their political implications for the Dutch Reformed Church (chapters 4–5).

Chapter 1 considers prevailing scholarly interpretations of Spinoza's TTP, explores the relevance of his Jewish upbringing, contemporary Dutch acquaintances, and other intellectual influences. Analyzing the text itself, Touber acknowledges the philosophically radical and more overtly philological chapters of the TTP, concentrating especially on the latter. He notes Spinoza's skeptical conclusions about the Hebrew Bible's content, consistency, and compilation, inferred on the basis of linguistic knowledge and textual comparisons, above all with respect to prophecy, the status of the Jews as God's chosen people, and Jewish religious law.

The second chapter explores early Dutch responses to the TTP by Spinoza's critics, including scripturarians such as Antonius Perizonius (Deventer) and Johannes Melchior (Herborn), the Cartesian Regnerus van Mansveld (Utrecht), the Collegiant book trader and ex-Remonstrant minister Frans Kuyper, and the sophisticated scripturarian Jean Le Clerc. Despite opposing Spinoza's conclusions, many of these critics employed his methods, seeking to use philology to support and defend Reformed Protestant doctrine but deepening concerns that endured into the next century. Touber explores some ways this was so in chapter 3, which examines biblical history and antiquarianism and the controversies to which they gave rise, including questions about the religious distinctiveness (or not) of the ancient Israelites in relationship to their geographical neighbors (including the oppressor Egyptians), the difficulties in grasping the meaning and character of the Temple of Solomon or the Urim and Thummim of Exodus 28:30, and some of the spectacularly unorthodox directions in which subversive biblical philology might be taken by lay or clerical interpreters.

In chapter 4, Touber analyzes the challenge of biblical scholarship to the established, “public church” in the United Provinces. He explores how political authority was deployed on behalf of the Reformed synods to support the institutionalized States’ translation of the Bible (1637) and the supplementary “formularies of unity,” against the difficulties raised by philological work for claims about the perspicuous clarity of scripture as enshrined in and taught by the Dutch Reformed Church. Spinoza's TTP and other works exacerbated this conflict, which was already evident in Utrecht in the 1660s and was replayed in Zevenwouden (Friesland) in the 1680s. This led to enduring rifts within Dutch Reformed Protestantism, albeit different from those prompted by Arminianism early in the century. The same sorts of conflicts are explored in more detail in chapter 5, which analyzes the controversies prompted by philological scholarship about the character of the Sabbath and the divisive questions about the universally valid or historically limited and ceremonial character of its observation.

A brief review cannot do justice to Touber's achievement. His work successfully situates Spinoza's TTP within the social relationships and intellectual trends of Dutch biblical philology in the later seventeenth century. Still, the book might have been even stronger had Touber not separated philology (in the broadest sense) so sharply from philosophy and theology as a methodological principle of analysis. He acknowledges that “philology, philosophy, and theology were seldom completely separated” among his protagonists (20), but this also pertains to Spinoza and the most heavily philological chapters of the TTP. Implicit philosophical and theological assumptions are rife in many inferences drawn by Spinoza and by those who appropriated his methods and agreed with some of his conclusions—for example, the implied either/or dichotomy between human compilation and divine revelation with respect to biblical texts or between historical contingencies and divine providence. Touber's book shows not the dawning realization of the Bible's constructed, purely human, non-sacred character sub specie aeternitatis, but the vulnerability of the politically protected Dutch Reformed view of scripture and Christian doctrine in particular, as enshrined in the Statenvertaling and auxiliary confessions of faith. In addition, more consideration of the ways in which politically and socially divisive, contested biblical interpretation had characterized Protestantism ever since the 1520s would have been helpful. So too might Touber have been less likely to accept some of the expansive claims made by Spinoza and others who followed him had he noted ways in which much later biblical critics have developed far more sophisticated ways of addressing problems that, to late-seventeenth-century scholars, seemed so subversive. Notwithstanding its achievement, Touber's book still partakes too much of a deeply ingrained, teleological narrative about the gradual, unavoidable desacralization of the Bible in early modern Europe.