The Emancipation of Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1590-1670 : Oxford University Press : 9780198803935 : 0198803931 : 18 Jul 2018 : The Emancipation of Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1590-1670 argues that the application of tools, developed in the study of ancient Greek and Latin authors, to the Bible was aimed at stabilizing the biblical text but had the unintentional effect that the text grew more and more unstable. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) capitalized on this tradition in his notorious Theological-political Treatise (1670). However, the foundations on which his radical biblical scholarship is built were laid by Reformed philologists who started from the hermeneutical assumption that philology was the servant of reformed dogma. On the basis of this principle, they pushed biblical scholarship to the center of historical studies during the first half of the seventeenth century. Dirk van Miert shows how Jacob Arminius, Franciscus Gomarus, the translators and rev