BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Annotations
travelling between Mesopotamia and Bethel is, I would say, quite absurd
despite the authority of Ibn Ezra. He hurried as much as he could not only
because he must have been longing to see his parents who were very old,
but especially to ful¢l his vow (see Genesis 28.20 and 31.13). 11 But if these
points appear to be conjectures rather than sound reasons, let us grant
that Jacob spent eight or ten or, if you like, even more years on this short 256
journey, whichwould make his fate worse than Ulysses’. Even so, they [such
commentators] could certainly not deny that Benjamin was born in the
¢nal year of this journey, i.e., on their hypothesis, when Joseph was ¢fteen
or sixteen or thereabouts. For Jacob left Laban in the seventh year after the
birth of Joseph and from the time when Josephwas seventeen to the year in
which the patriarch himself went down into Egypt, we cannot, as we have
shown in this very chapter, count more than twenty-two years.Therefore,
when Benjamin set out for Egypt he was at most twenty-three or twentyfour
years old, and at this young age it is clear that he must have had
grandsons (see Genesis 46.21, and compare itwith Numbers 26.38^40 and
with 1 Chronicles 8.1¡.). 12 This is assuredly no less contrary to reason than
[to insist] that Dinah was raped when she was seven years old or than the
other things we have deduced from the chronology of this story. Hence, it
is su⁄ciently evident that as these unscholarly commentators try to solve
these knotty problems, they merely create others and make it all still more
complicated and incoherent.
Annotation 15 (p. 133) ‘starts to tell’
‘That is to say, in di¡erent terms and in a di¡erent order than they are
found in the book of Joshua.’ 13
Annotation 16 (p. 133) ‘Othniel son of Kenaz was judge’
Rabbi Levi ben Gerson 14 and others believe that these forty years
which Scripture says they spent in liberty begin with Joshua’s death and
11 ‘And God had also reminded him to pay his vow’ (Genesis 31.3 and 13) and promised him his help
to bring him back to his country’.
12 ‘For Bela, the ¢rst-born of Benjamin, had begotten two sons, Ard and Naaman’.
13 This Annotation exists in French only.
14 Gersonides (1288-c. 1344),(or Levi ben Gershom) whose acronym was Ralbag lived in Provence, in
southern France.Writing in Hebrew, he was an eminent mathematician, astronomer, Bible exegete
and philosophical commentator on Aristotle, Euclid and Averroes.
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