These volumes are welcome treatments of important themes within eighteenth-century German biblical scholarship. Lee's Biblical accommodation debate examines theological discussion of the issue of ‘accommodation’: whether, when and how revelation was moulded to suit human capacities. Theologians from Augustine onwards had held that God had condescended to human frailties through the manner, but not the content, of revelation. From the late sixteenth century onwards, this was challenged by the Socinian accommodation tradition which claimed that revelation's content was similarly moulded to suit limited human capacities through the use of pre-existing but erroneous beliefs. Lee surveys two earlier discussions to contextualise the high point of the debate (c. 1760s–1830s). Socinian accommodation theory was consolidated by seventeenth-century Dutch theologians, such as Balthasar Bekker, and linked to Cartesian natural philosophy. The focus here was on explaining the Book of Scriptures’ cosmological errors, exposed by recent discoveries in the Book of Nature, as necessary accommodations to ancient scientific ignorance. Many early eighteenth-century German theologians, most influentially Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten, adopted the Socinian means of interpreting Scripture, though they replaced the Cartesianism with Wolffian philosophy and switched focus from cosmological to doctrinal issues. They were opposed, in turn, by Pietist Lutherans’ continued defences of Augustinian accommodation. From the 1760s the volume of German texts specifically addressing accommodation grew dramatically. The focus now shifted to the New Testament and the question of whether the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles condescended to common understandings. By the 1790s Socinian accommodation had became the dominant mode, but its pre-eminence was short-lived. Improvements in the sophistication of historical biblical criticism led to the obsolescence of accommodationist theories, with Jesus and the Apostles increasingly viewed as products of their historical context unable to think in ways different from those of their own times. Once this idea became prevalent, the energy of the debate evaporated.

Ofri Ilany's In search of the Hebrew people explores various strands of eighteenth-century German Hebraism, going beyond the narrow focus on Johann Davis Michaelis's Mosaic law (1771) and Herder's On the spirit of Hebrew poetry (1782–3) in terms of authors discussed and in demonstrating Hebraism's wider significance. Ilany opens by exploring how the Enlightenment's historico-anthropological methods for studying ancient and ‘savage’ peoples were applied to the Hebrews, resulting in their re-description as part wandering Bedouin tribe, part key players in the natural history of humanity's progress. Led by Michaelis, such studies did not secularise readings of the Bible, but aimed to comprehend the Hebrews’ world in order better to understand Scripture. Ilany proceeds to an exploration of the status of biblical law in German jurisprudence. Hebraist studies here, with Michaelis central again, distinguished between Moses's ‘universal legislative principles’, which remained of contemporary relevance, and Moses's enlightened political use of ‘customary Hebrew law’, which was perfectly framed for a primitive, Middle Eastern people. The third chapter explores the debate over the Israelites’ conquest of the Canaanites in which German theologians, responding to attacks from freethinkers including Johann Christian Edelmann and Hermann Samuel Reimarus, defended extermination on the grounds of the Hebrews’ historical link to the land. Here we find Michaelis and Herder at their most unpalatable: defenders of genocide because the Hebrews were, unlike the Canaanites, a unified tribe with a developed language, religion and morality.

Ilany's final two chapters explore the cultural manifestations of German Hebraism. Hebrew was viewed as a language of ‘naturalness, sublimity and emotionality’ (p. 90) that could be imitated to distinguish German literature from French-tainted neoclassicism, while the Hebrews were acclaimed for exhibiting a strong national religion and culture that could inspire German equivalents – Herder described the Hebrew theocracy as an ‘ideal model’ (p. 101). Ilany treads new ground here in exploring the Hebraic poetical revival epitomised in the works of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. The analysis then assesses the popularisation of these themes, but also the closing down of German Hebraism. Developments in biblical criticism, epitomised by Wilheilm Lebrecht de Wette's Contribution to an introduction to the Old Testament (1806), emphasised the fictionality of Scripture – rendering it without ‘historical, political, or juridical merit’, valuable only for its ‘religious and artistic content’ (pp. 131–2). The decline of enthusiasm was compounded by the succeeding generation of Romantics who now looked for imitable national myths and poetic beauty in India, fairy tales and medieval fictions.

Lee and Ilany do a good job in bringing to the fore important yet understudied contributions from lesser known figures. They are read profitably together, not least because their chronologies and arguments do not overlap. Lee's analysis is precise, bordering on terse, and often overloaded with abstract nouns that will alienate the uninitiated. Ishai Mishory's translation of Ilany's 2014 Hebrew original is lively and readable – the book is also a joyously short 149 pages. The criticisms that inevitably befall any works professing to contribute to Enlightenment studies are, with apologies to the reader, relevant here. Despite the promise of its title, Lee's volume is only very lightly embedded in the wider historiography and has little to say about the German Enlightenment – which occasionally seems like a synonym for ‘eighteenth century’ – beyond its narrow doctrinal focus. Ilany, by contrast, engages with a wide array of important themes. That said, it is not always clear whether his German authors are contributors to or opponents of ‘the Enlightenment’. Similarly, Ilany reifies ‘the Enlightenment’ into something that he can position his German authors as arguing against, yet such reification is not persuasive. Lee's volume is a solid piece of scholarship that will certainly appeal to specialists in the history of biblical criticism. It does share the list-like quality – in which each contributor's ideas on highly specific themes are briefly summarised in turn – characteristic of such doctrinal histories that will prevent it from being accessible or, most likely, engaging for a wider readership. Ilany's volume should appeal to eighteenth-century German, intellectual and religious historians, not least because it does an excellent job of capturing the energetic and innovative quality of much of late eighteenth-century German thought.