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VOLTAIRE ON THE BIBLE (BIBLE.) [Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet.] La Bible enfin expliquée par plusieurs Aumoniers de S. M. l. R. d. P. [4], 274; [4], [275]-550, [1] pages, including half-titles and final leaf with instructions to binder. 2 volumes in one. 8vo, contemporary calf gilt, spine ends chipped, lower outer cover corners worn through; first half-title and title browned in outer margin, full-page quotation from Volney's Recherches sur l'Histoire Ancienne written in ink on first title verso, scattered pencil marginalia. "Londres" [i. e., Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey], 1776
First published the same year in Geneva. "In La Bible enfin expliquée (1776)--one of his last major works--Voltaire put forward his most systematic satire of both Christian and Jewish biblical exegesis. His title is manifestly ironic: his concern is not to 'explain' the Bible, but systematically to expose its absurdities, contradictions, and ethical shortcomings . . . This text is perhaps the most rhetorically powerful statement of the repudiation of Hebraist scholarship by the philosophes of the High Enlightenment. Voltaire and his allies regarded rabbinic literature as the very quintessence of obscurantism and pedantry, and as such the defining polar opposite of their own self-consciously engaged intellectual values"--University of Pennsylvania Center for Judaic Studies Library, Hebraica Veritas. Bengesco 1861.
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