A Book Forged in Hell by Steven Nadler

Author:Steven Nadler [Steven Nadler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-11-05T04:00:00+00:00

Spinoza provides the example of Moses, who is reported in the Torah as saying that God is fire and that God is jealous. How to interpret such statements, and especially determining whether to read them literally or figuratively, is not a matter of deciding whether or not a literal reading is consistent with demonstrated philosophical truths about God. Rather, it involves looking at the relevant passages in the light of the basic principles of Scripture already derived from the data, along with other things that Moses says and the circumstances in which he is saying them. Since Moses does clearly and consistently state elsewhere that God has no resemblance to visible things, the sentence in which he says that God is fire must be read metaphorically. “The question as to whether Moses did or did not believe that God is fire must in no wise be decided by the rationality or irrationality of the belief, but solely from other pronouncements of Moses.”⁸¹ The Hebrew word for “fire” can be used to refer to anger, and because a leader would find such imagistic language to be more effective for motivating others to obey God, it can be concluded that Moses did not mean to assert that God is literally flamelike. As Spinoza says to van Blijenburgh some years earlier, in a letter from early 1665, sometimes the authors of Scripture tailored their language to the understanding of the masses. “Scripture, being particularly adapted to the needs of the common people, continually speaks in merely human fashion, for the common people are incapable of understanding higher things.”⁸²

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