BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Furtherqueries
It begins,‘Saulwas ...years oldwhen he began to reign, and he reigned for
two ye ars ove r Is rael’. W ho do e s not s e e that Saul’s age whe n he acquire d
the king ship ha s b e e n o mitte d It is als o u nde niable, I b elieve , that a large r
nu mb e r is i mpli e d by the histor y its elf. For 1 Samuel 27.7 s ays that David
re main e d am ong the Philist in e s , to who m he had £ e d on acc ou n t of Saul,
for on e ye ar and fou r m on ths. By this reckoning eve r ything els e had to
have happ e n e d in a space of e igh t m on ths , which I do not supp o s e anyon e
b eli eve s. Jo s e phus , at any rate , at the e nd of the s ixth b o ok of his An tiq u iti , es
c or recte d the text to: ‘Therefore Saul re ig n e d while Samuel wa s st ill alive
for e igh te e n ye ars , and for another two afte r his death’. 14
As a matte r of fact , the whole acc ou n t in chapte r 13 tot ally fails to ¢ t
with what c o me s b efore it. At the e nd of chapte r 7 it wa s st ate d that the
Philist ine s we re s o c o mple tely cr ushed by the Hebrews that they did not
dare to approach the front i e r of Is rael in Samuel’s life- t i me. But he re we
le ar n that in the life- t i me of Samuel the Hebrews we re invade d by the
Philist ine s , by who m they had b e e n re duce d to such mis e r y and p ove r ty
that they lacked weapons with which to defe nd th ems e lve s an d any me ans 134
to make them. I would certainly have my work cut out to try to reconcile
all thes e stories in the ¢rst bo ok of Samuel s o that they could plausibly
appear to have be en written and put in order by a single chronicler.
[10] But to re tu r n to my the me. The ye ars of Saul’s reign must b e added
to my c alculat ion. I have als o not include d the ye ars of anarchy am ong the
Hebrews, because they are not consistently detailed in Scripture itself. It is
not clear in my opinion, how long the period was in which the events
re c orde d in the b o ok of Judge s from chapte r 17 to the e nd to ok place. Fro m
all this it most evidently follows that a true chronology of these years cannot
be legitimately compiled from the histories themselves, and that the
histories do not agree with each other on one and the same chronology but
assume very di¡erent ones. We must therefore conclude that these histories
have been collected from di¡erent writers, without being [properly]
examined or put in order.
[11] There seems to have been no less a discrepancy between the
chronology of the ‘Chronicles of the Kings of Judah’ and that of the
‘Chronicles of the Kings of Israel’. In the‘Chronicles of the Kings of Israel’,
14 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 6.378.
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