Spinoza and the Bible

As a Jew, Spinoza had to raise a somewhat different set of questions than Hobbes and Locke. While the questions of the latter grew out of their lives safely ensconced in the relatively homogeneous majority of their own land and led to the development of the idea of civil society, Spinoza, a Jew seeking admission to the larger society from which he was excluded, provided the intellectual basis for liberal democracy. The first modern secular Jew, he championed the separation of religion and state and the development of a basically secular society in which Jews, Christians, and others could be accepted without regard to their religious or ethnic ancestry. To foster his goal he had to confront the Bible and either refute its claims or render them unimportant to civil society. The most knowledgeable of the seventeenth century philosophers when it came to Scripture because of the Jewish education of his childhood, he "invented" modern biblical criticism.