The Chosen People
Spinoza—though Jewish himself—conducts a strong argument against the concept that Jews are God’s “chosen people.” This concept is a fundamental tenant of evangelical Christianity as well as the Jewish faith itself. Imagery lifted directly from scripture, however, raises questions pointing to the fact either Jews are not God’s chosen or that Jews are the chosen of a distinctly bipolar God:
“In Leviticus 18:27–8 Moses warns the Israelites not to pollute themselves by incest, as the Canaanites did, for fear that the earth would vomit them forth as it vomited forth the nations that had inhabited those places. And Deuteronomy 8:19–20 very explicitly threatens them with total ruin: ‘I warn you this day that you shall certainly perish; like the nations that the Lord will cause to perish before you.’
Reading What You Want to See
Throughout the text, Spinoza criticizes scriptural interpretation as being a case of taking out whatever one wants to read into it. Several examples of this are provided, including the follow example of how the imagery written into the Bible is taken out according only to perception:
“In 1 Samuel 9:15–16 we are told that God revealed to Samuel that he would send Saul to him. But God did not ‘send’ Saul to him in the way men usually ‘send’ one man to another. This ‘sending by God’ was nothing but the order of nature itself, as we see in that same chapter (·verses 3–10·), which reports that Saul had been looking for asses that he had lost, and was about ready to ·give up and· return home without them, when he went to the prophet Samuel, on the advice of his servant, to learn from him where he could find them. There is nothing in the whole narrative to indicate that Saul had any command from God other than this natural causal chain leading him to go to Samuel.”
The Body of God
Spinoza attributes descriptions of God in scripture to a failure of the imagination on the part of those who wrote it. Spinoza was popular with neither Jewish nor Christian leadership because he would not just sit back, spit rationality into the mud, and accept that the Bible was the Word of God revealed to a few lucky men mentioned by name:
“Now, because the people were intellectually limited, Scripture usually depicts God as being like a man, and attributes to God a mind, a heart, emotions, even a body and breath; so that ‘the spirit of God’ is often used in the sacred texts for the mind (i.e. heart), affect, force, and breath of the mouth of God…‘The spirit of God’ also means, as I have said, God’s breath—for the Scripture does endow God with breath, which is as improper as its attributing to him a mind, a heart, and a body—see for example Psalms 33:6.”
Theocracy
Spinoza uses imagery to paint the portrait of a theocracy. This portrait turns out to be far less rigid and severe than the one Americans usually consider when picturing a theocracy. In fact, it sounds very much like the America that tens of millions of its citizens keep hoping for when they cast their votes:
“The tenets of religion weren’t doctrines that were taught, they were laws and commands that were issued; piety was regarded as justice, and impiety as a crime and an injustice. Anyone who failed in his religious duties lost his citizenship and was therefore regarded as an enemy; anyone who died for religion was considered to have died for his country; and no distinction at all was made between civil law and religion. That State could be called a ‘theocracy’, because its citizens were not bound by any law except the law revealed by God.”
