BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings
whatever position they have taken up, in the name of religion.There seems
to be no room left for reason except perhaps among a very few persons
(few in relation to the rest), so completely have these prejudices taken over
men’s minds. I will however make the attempt and not give up on the task,
since there is no reason for complete despair.
[3] In order to demonstrate these things in due order, I commence with
the false assumptions generally made about the real authors of the sacred
books, and ¢rst with the author of the Pentateuch, whom nearly everyone
has believed to be Moses. Indeed the Pharisees so vigorously defended this
supposition that they considered anyone who took a di¡erent view a heretic.This
is why Ibn Ezra, a man of quite liberal disposition and considerable
learning, who was the ¢rst of all the writers I have read to call attention
to this assumption, did not dare plainly to state his view but merely hinted
at it with some rather obscure words which I shall not be afraid to render
clearer here in order to make the point itself quite evident.
Here are Ibn Ezra’s words from his commentary on Deuteronomy:
‘‘‘Beyond the Jordan etc’’: If you understand the mystery of the twelve and
of ‘‘Moses wrote the Law’’and ‘‘the Canaanite was then in the land’’and ‘‘it
will be revealed on the mountain of God’’and also‘‘behold his bed, a bed of
iron’’, thenyou will know the truth’. 2 In these few words he discloses and, at
the same time, demonstrates that it was not actually Moses who wrote the
Pentateuch but some other person who lived much later, and that the book
Moses wrote was a di¡erent work.
In order to prove this, he notes:
(1) that the preface of Deuteronomy could not have been composed by 119
Moses, since he did not cross the Jordan.
(2) that the entire book of Moses was inscribedvery distinctly on the face of a
single altar (see Deuteronomy 27, Joshua 8.37, etc.), an altar which consisted of
only twelve stones according to the report of the rabbis, from which it follows
that the book of Moses was a much more slender volume than the Pentateuch.
This is what I think our author wished to signify by referring to ‘the mystery of
the twelve’, though he might have meant the twelve curses mentioned in the
same chapter of Deuteronomy. For it could be that he believed that they had
not been included in the book of the Law, because, Moses not only commanded
the Levites to inscribe the Law but also to recite these curses in order to bind the
2 Commentary on Deuteronomy, 1.5.
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