Spinoza's hermeneutics: Some heretical thoughts

The biblical scholarship Spinoza deploys in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) stands in a long tradition of humanist philology. The radical thrust of the book lay not so much in the techniques as in the conclusions which Spinoza, spurred by his philosophical agenda, allowed himself to draw from the results. His historical contextualization of the biblical Sitz im Leben resembled what humanist philologists like Joseph Scaliger had done long before: a reconstruction of the circumstances in which a text was produced, with an eye to time, space, and culture. The central chapters in the Tractatus also show that Spinoza was not the most outstanding representative of this scholarly tradition.