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Early Edition. With an engraved frontispiece portrait of Spencer and a profusion of finely engraved, large and elaborate head- and tail-pieces throughout, Hebrew fonts used within the text throughout Folio, bound in contemporary calf over dark-grey antique paper covered boards, the spine with large light calf coloured lettering label gilt, gilt decorations to the head and tail of the spine, Frontispiece, [36], 1232, [30 Index] pp. A very clean copy internally, crisp and unpressed, especially well preserved, the binding complete and original, some rubbing to the edges and tips as to be expected, front cover detached, the book now covered with plastic jacket which holds the upper board in place. A handsome copy. A SIGNIFICANT WORK. John Spencer (1630 93), was biblical scholar, master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and dean of Ely Cathedral. Today, Spencer remains a signi cant gure for European intellectual history. Long hailed as a forerunner of the modern study of religion, more recent studies have seen him as a key gure in the overthrow of biblical chronology and the rise of secular interpretations of the Bible. Amos Funkenstein made Spencer a protagonist of the historical revolution of the seventeenth century, who forged a new kind of contextual history based on the reconstruction of past mentalities. The last few years have seen the publication of a number of studies about the origins of modern scholarship that include Spencer. This is an exhaustive work on the traditions of the Jewish people, compiled by a most profound expert and scholar of Jewish matters. According to Spencer, the Mosaic Law had to be understood in terms of its two divine purposes: rst and foremost, it was meant to abolish idolatry among the Jews; secondarily, some commandments served as mysteries , representing sacred truths. The Jews at the time of Moses, he argued, were thoroughly addicted to the idolatrous religion of the Egyptians. Thus, when God desired to lead them back to true religion, he provided the Mosaic commandments to cure them of their habit by means such as: promises of temporal rewards and punishments; marks to distinguish them from their pagan neighbours; distinctions between the pure and impure; prohibitions against the idolatrous practices of their neighbours; and the transfer of other pagan rites into the cult of the true God. Spencer was most interested in the last two means, to which he devoted the entire second and third books of the three-part DE LIGIBUS HEBRAEORUM RITUALIBUS. Throughout, he claimed that God had accommodated the Law to the particular circumstances and capacities of the ancient Jews. As Spencer acknowledged, his thesis built upon a theory put forth by Maimonides in the twelfth century. In an in uential section of his GUIDE OF THE PERPLEXED, Maimonides argued that the goal of abolishing idolatry and effacing its memory was the foundation of the whole of our Law and the pivot around which it turns . Like Spencer, he used this principle to unlock the meaning of many commandments that seemed resistant to rational explanation, arguing not only that certain Mosaic laws were designed to prevent the Jews from participating in idolatrous rites, but that others transferred pagan rituals into the divine cult. Daniel Stolzenberg, University of California, Davis, 2014.
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