BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

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chapter 9
Further queries about the same books, namely,
whether Ezra made a de¢nitive version of them, and
whether the marginal notes found in the Hebrew
MSS are variant readings
[1] How much the investigation we have made into who really wrote
these books improves our understanding of them is readily seen merely
from the passages cited above con¢rming our view of that question.
Without it, anyone would certainly ¢nd them highly obscure. But apart
from the question of authorship, there are other aspects of the books
themselves which remain to be remarked on which popular superstition
does not permit ordinary people to come to grips with. The foremost of
these is that Ezra (whom I will continue to regard as their author until
someone demonstrates a more certain candidate) made no ¢nal version of
the narratives contained in them, but merely collected narratives from
di¡erent writers, sometimes just copying them out as they were, and passed
them on to posterity without examining them properly and setting
them in due order. I cannot conjecture the reasons (except perhaps an
early death) that prevented him from completing this task in every respect.
But the fact itself is abundantly attested even though we lack the [works of]
the ancient Hebrew historians, by the very few fragments of their works
that remain to us.
[2] The history of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18.17 ¡.) is related as it was
found written in the ‘Chronicles of the Kings of Judah’. For we ¢nd the
whole of this history in the book of Isaiah, and the book of Isaiah itself was
contained in the ‘Chronicles of the Kings of Judah’ (see 2 Chronicles
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