The Sabbath: Biblical Scholarship and Ecclesiastical Discipline

Chapter 5 takes a long-term view of one seventeenth-century conflict, the meaning of the Sabbath, so as to gauge philology’s potential to redefine the significance of biblical texts. As the debates over the Fourth Commandment and the Lord’s Day dragged on, the terms of the debate remained discouragingly constant: the Fourth Commandment was appealed to as being either universally obliging or historically contingent. Within this static spectrum, though, we observe some surprising movements. Around 1670 the sabbatarian debate was caught up in several developments of broader purport, notably the controversial catechism of Balthasar Bekker and the ‘Egyptian thesis’ launched by John Spencer. By the end of the seventeenth century, even though the same basic arguments were propounded as they had been a century earlier, the leeway for philological sophistication had broadened subtly, in the hope of warding off more recent and more menacing instances of biblical scholarship, such as Spinoza’s.