The seventh and final chapter presents a new interpretation of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). Having set out the course of his early career (and especially his study of Hebrew manuscripts in the library of the Oratory), it outlines how Simon presented a novel account of the practice and purpose of Catholic biblical scholarship. Its conclusion reflects on why this was found challenging by his contemporaries, and discusses how the reception of his work differed so extensively from that of Louis Cappel’s Critica sacra.

Chapter 6 shows how the later 1650s and 1660s defy ready categorisation, with the practices and tools of biblical scholarship being drawn on in a range of different ways in a range of different contexts. Its three parts proceed concurrently, rather than chronologically, and successively analyse: the way in which debate concerning the Old Testament became increasingly polemical, framed in terms of a choice between the Masoretic Hebrew text or the Septuagint; how biblical scholarship differed according to different local settings (in this case Italy (and especially Rome) and the Dutch Republic); and how Benedict de Spinoza, comparatively disconnected from the confessionalised world of Old Testament scholarship, targeted a precise set of the views concerning the Bible held by others in his local Reformed and Jewish communities.

Chapter 5 is devoted to Brian Walton and the London Polyglot Bible. It shows how Walton’s work was not simply an erudite accumulation of information from print and manuscript sources, but rather took a precise stand in the debates concerning the Old Testament that swirled around the Protestant world of the early 1650s. It examines how this created problems for would-be collaborators elsewhere in Europe, how Walton justified his approach by presenting a novel synthesis in the work’s ‘Prolegomena’, and how the vernacular dispute between Walton and his most prominent opponent, John Owen, turned on how they justified their work in terms of contemporary Reformed scholarship.

Chapter 2 turns to the genesis and gestation of a succession of major Protestant and Catholic publications in the 1620s and early 1630s. It shows how the work of two scholars, Louis Cappel and Jean Morin, can be understood as alternative ways of responding to the challenge posed by Johann Buxtorf’s Tiberias (1620), a pathbreaking account of the history of the Masoretic text.

Uses the ideas of revision and reuse to reframe scholarly conversations about rewriting within manuscripts and versions of the Hebrew Bible. Shows how canonically oriented labels like “rewritten Bible” and “innerbiblical exegesis” impede our understanding, and how the neutral terms used here can facilitate comparison to rewriting in other corpora.