Following René Descartes, now Wiker and Hahn are on to Bento d'Espinoza. In between they discuss a few others.
I don't know that Spinoza has a place in a book titled Politicizing the Bible. Spinoza didn't do politics. Spinoza's antecedents were Hobbes arguing for a theory of absolute kingship and Machiavelli advising on the king's conduct. About all He has in common with the former that his books got banned and, with the latter, that he left several of his manuscripts to be published posthumously. In Spinoza's times the Bible was already subject for secular study. I am worrying if Hahn's and Wiker's own book has carried on too long by now.
What this chapter does net us are those intermediaries between Descartes and Spinoza. Da Costa seems very tragic - less a philosopher than a depressive. De Prado held to a universe boundless in time so was, er, wrong. Wiker and Hahn find more interesting Isaac de la Peyrère.
Like Descartes, la Peyrère was optimistic about how much knowledge seventeenth-century Europe had acquired. In 1655 he published the Prae Adamitae which entered the English tongue the following year as Men Before Adam. Samuel Fisher built from la Peyrère in turn. Menassah ben Israel rebutted him.
La Peyrère believed that Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy preceded 4000 BC. He also could not see where to fit the Native Americans and Inuits - "Eskimos" then called. He noted that not all the races owned a Flood myth as had the Greeks and the Jews. But the man was unwilling to abandon the Bible entirely. He concluded that vast swathes of humanity had branched away before Adam's Fall. Adam is, then, the father ultimately only of Noah so of Ham, Shem, and Japheth; Asians, Americans, and Africans are para-Adamites. And the Flood never reached them, or at least reached only part of them.
His main source was Claude Saumaise' De annis climactericis, a comprehensive refutation of astrology published 1648 which, I think, had pretty much written off the whole science.
We now know through several scientodic lines that la Peyrère was right: the Bible is for Semites and doesn't know much beyond its Levantine and Iraqi world. The world's Flood myths as we know them postdate, by far, the migrations and separations of the world's human races and have little in common besides the molecule of water. In addition not all human races even have a Flood myth. Egyptian and Babylonian history are deeper than the Biblical narrative. The Mesoamericans (and Chinese) kept their own records, Mesoamerica fixing its year-zero at 3114 BC.
What I don't know is how Saumaise or la Peyrère could have known all this and, I have to conclude, that they didn't. Egyptian, Sumerian, and Mayan in script were none of them legible to the seventeenth century reader; Sumerian not even comprehensible. European sources for these cultures were really, really second-hand at best. These two skeptics left themselves wide open to a critique like Menasseh's.
UPDATE 10/16: The authors get into Spinoza's politics later in that chapter.
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