Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- ‘God Sets Out Things by Mediation of Other Men’: The Question of Mediation in the Remonstrant Controversy -- Hobbes’s Twist on Mediation: The Sovereign Prophet -- The Bible as Shared Political Paradigm -- Spinoza on Jus circa sacra -- Spinoza on Libertas philosophandi -- Spinoza and Hobbes on the Authority of the Bible -- The Making of Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s Polarity (1): Media of Revelation -- The Making of Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s Polarity (2): The Spirit of God -- Ulrik Huber and the Hobbesiani: The Mediator Concept within Jus publicum universale -- Conclusion: Where the Paths Cross.

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Tracing key biblical topics recurrent in Grotian and Hobbesian discourses on the church-state relationship, The Sovereign and the Prophets examines Spinoza’s Old Testament interpretation in the Theologico-political Treatise and elucidates his effort to establish what Hobbes could not adequately offer to the Dutch: the liberty to philosophize. Fukuoka develops an original method for understanding seventeenth-century biblical arguments as a shared political paradigm. Her in-depth analysis reveals the discourses that converged on the question, ‘Who stands immediately under God to mediate His will to the people?’ This subtly nuanced theme not only linked major theoreticians diachronically—from the Remonstrants such as Grotius to the anti-Hobbesian jurist Ulrik Huber (1636–1694)—but also synchronically built the axis of resonances and dissonances between Leviathan and the Theologico-political Treatise .

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