BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Theological-Political Treatise
every day, and Absalom £ed and went to Geshur and stayed there for
three years’. 19 I remember noticing other such passages which will not
come back to me at the moment.
[15] That the marginal notes which occur throughout the Hebrew MSS
were doubtful readings, cannot be questioned by anyone who sees that
most of them have arisen owing to the great similarity of Hebrew letters
with each other. I refer, for example, to the similarity of kaf and bet, yad and
vav, dalet and resh, and so on.When 2 Samuel 5.24 gives,‘and at that’ (time)
‘at which you will hear’, there is a note in the margin,‘when you will hear’.
At Judges 21.22,‘and when their fathers or their brothers come to us in
multitude’ (i.e.‘often’)’etc., there is a marginal note,‘in order to complain’.
Many such errors have also arisen from the use of the letters which they
call silent letters , i.e., letters whose pronunciation is often not felt and are
confused with one another. For example, at Leviticus 25.30 the text is,‘and
the house that is in the city which has no wall will be guaranteed’, but in the
margin we ¢nd,‘which has a wall’, and so on.
[16] But although these things are clear enough in themselves, we would
like to answer the claims of certain Pharisees who try to persuade us that
the marginal notes were added or indicated by the biblical writers themselves
to signify some mystery. They take the ¢rst of these arguments
(which I do not ¢nd very persuasive) from the custom of reading the
Scriptures aloud. If, they say, these notes were put beside the text because
there was a variety of readings and later generations were unable to delete
either of them, why did it become the custom always to retain the marginal
137 sense Why, they say, did they write the sense that they wanted to retain in
the margin On the contrary, they should have written the scrolls themselves
as they wanted them to be read instead of writing in the margin the
sense and reading of which they most approved.
The second argument appears to have some plausibility, being taken
from the actual nature of the phenomenon: namely, that errors creep into
codices not by design but by chance and whatever happens in that way
happens randomly. But in the Five Books of Moses the word ‘girl’ is
invariably (with one exception) written defectively, contrary to the rules of
grammar, without the letter he while, on the contrary, in the margin it
19 Spinoza’s footnote: see Annotation 20.
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