BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Note on the text and translation
unlikely ever to converge with the pronouncements of the biblical prophets:
‘it must be said of all the prophets who gave laws in the name of God’, he
remarks loftily,‘that they did not perceive the decrees of God adequately as
eternal truths.’
Finally, Spinoza supplied all the original Old and New Testament
quotations in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, as well as some citations from
Maimonides and Ibn Ezra in Hebrew, providing his own translations into
Latin. We have not reproduced his original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek
quotations here. While Spinoza’s Hebrew texts are not always identical in
every word, or in punctuation, with the text in the Hebrew Bible and while
we are very conscious that even where his wording is identical his
interpretation of these passages often radically diverges from those adopted
in the Vulgate and in the ecclesiastically approved Protestant Latin and
vernacular translations of Scripture, it seemed clear that in translating
Spinoza’s text what really matters is to convey accurately the way he renders
these biblical and other citations into Latin. Hence, following the procedure
adopted by nearly all the vernacular translations, early modern and modern,
we have simply translated Spinoza’s Latin rendering of the Hebrew originals
as these are (almost identically) reproduced in the Gebhardt and Akkerman
editions.
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