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Horst Steinke
242
Klasse der unmittelbar und vollständig vergewisserungsfähigen Bedeutungen
und [1
st
kind:] diejenige der unverständlichen noch [2
nd
kind:] eine dritte Klas-
se von pragmatisch zwar ausreichenden, aber inferioren, bloß moralisch ge-
wissen Urteilen. Damit ist der Ort historischer Erkenntnis epistemologisch
bestimmt (Thus Spinoza inserts between [3
rd
kind of knowledge:] the class of
meanings that are immediately and completely truth-evaluable, and [1
st
kind:]
the class of unintelligible meanings, additionally [2
nd
kind:] a third class of
evaluations that are inferior and merely certain in matters of morals, though
adequate for pragmatic purposes. This then establishes and fixes the episte-
mological position of historical knowledge)» (Id.,
Biblische Hermeneutik und
his-
torische Erklärung
, cit., p. 279).
493
TTP,
pp. 98-99.
494
This can be seen in the way Spinoza “deconstructs” Moses’ authorship
of the Pentateuch in Chapter 8 (pp. 105-115 in the Shirley translation). It is
well-known that Moses’s authorship was called in question, and even denied,
by others before Spinoza, most notably by Hobbes and Isaac La Peyrère (in a
work published in Amsterdam in 1655), and Spinoza himself claims that the
12
th
-century Jewish commentator Ibn Ezra already doubted Moses’s author-
ship; on this question, W. Z. Harvey pointed out, however: «With one excep-
tion, Ibn Ezra’s examples, as Spinoza himself interprets them, do not prove
that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, but only that there are some passag-
es in it not written by him. […] As for Ibn Ezra’s true view, it might be ar-
gued plausibly that he had in mind only minor interpolations» (Id.,
Spinoza on
Ibn Ezra’s “secret of the twelve
”, in
Spinoza’s
Theological-Political Treatise, cit., pp.
41-55, p. 47). Another possible influence was Menasseh ben Israel, and his
work
Conciliator
of 1632 (E. M. Curley,
Notes on a Neglected Masterpiece: Spinoza
and the Science of Hermeneutics,
in
Spinoza: The Enduring Questions
, ed. by G.
Hunter, Toronto-Buffalo-London, University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp. 64-
99, pp. 70-77). R. H. Popkin considers Samuel Fisher (1605-1665), and his
book entitled
The Rustics Alarm to the Rabbis
(1660) as a significant influence
(Id.,
Some New Light on the Roots of Spinoza’s Science of Bible Study
, in
Spinoza and
the Sciences
, cit., pp. 171-188). However, rather than attributing Spinoza’s views
simply to his
ad hoc
reception of prevalent views that were congenial to him,
we postulate that his treatment of Moses (and
mutatis mutandis
of other parts
of Scripture) is circumscribed and animated by his philosophical and episte-
mological commitments, thus agreeing with Curley: «One thing that distin-
guishes Spinoza from both Hobbes and La Peyrère is that he has what they
do not – a well-worked out theory of what is required for the interpretation of
a text» (Id.,
Notes on a Neglected Masterpiece: Spinoza and the Science of Hermeneutics
,
cit., p. 77).