God’s Word Confirmed Authority, Truth and the Text of the Early Modern Jewish Bible

The nature of the Amsterdam Jewish community engendered a dynamic in which philology played but a small part. Three authors are discussed, in order to depict ongoing debates on Bible and oral tradition as authoritative sources. Uriel da Costa rejected rabbinic oral law, claiming that it amounted to a limitation of the perfection of the written law. Conversely, Immanuel Aboab defended the oral law, on the grounds that both written law and human reason were divine in origin, therefore it was perfectly legitimate to employ reason to interpret written law. Menasseh ben Israel adhered to a meandering casuistry in reconciling contradictory biblical passages. He confirmed the age-old Talmudic idea of the disunity of the biblical text: inconsistencies should be seen as God’s invitation to mankind to ponder scriptural meaning piously and creatively.