Biblical Israel and Modern Political Thought

This book, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, looks really interesting (and manageable at only 240 pages!):

Eric Nelson’s magnificent book is a trim and incisive scholarly history that aims to show how something called the Hebrew Republic “transformed political thought” between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Hebrew Republic, imagined by Christian scholars during that golden age of new thinking about politics, was a reconstruction of the Israelite state described in the Bible. Its constitution, they believed, had been given directly by God and as such was a model of the perfect polity. Nelson argues that the discovery of this mythic civic past helped European political thinkers to establish three of the modern West’s “fundamental ideals”: the superiority of kingless government; the right of governments to redistribute wealth; and religious toleration. For the history of Western politics, this makes the story of the Hebrew Republic momentous indeed. . . .

Scholars working on modernity—and there are more and more of them as post-modernism’s star wanes—have revived the venerable view of secularization as a key ingredient in Western modernity. In different ways, both Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God and Jonathan Israel’s ongoing Radical Enlightenment trilogy link modernity’s rise to the decline of religion.

The Hebrew Republic boldly claims that the secularism-as-modernism narrative is incomplete at best, and at worst totally backwards. The history of Israelite theocracy offered what we might call a “faith-based” route to toleration, which existed alongside the secularizing Spinozist path explored by Jonathan Israel. Republican exclusivism likewise emerged from a profound belief in and engagement with the Bible, not a rejection of it. Indeed, so deeply does Nelson find the Hebrew Republic enracinated in modernity that he wonders, near the end of the book, whether it might be that “God remains our sleeping sovereign after all.”