Some years ago, during the obligatory academic wine and nibbles after a departmental research seminar, a senior academic who I barely knew asked me what I was working on. When I told him it was Elizabeth I of England's biblical analogies, and that I was particularly excited to have found an interesting source earlier that day, his response was a mix of condescension and incredulity: “surely,” he said, “there is nothing more to be said about this. Everyone knows that Elizabeth was often compared to Deborah.” This was, of course, not an encouraging endorsement.

Nevertheless, he was right—partially. There is a plethora of scholarship on Elizabeth's biblical analogies, with different figures receiving varying amounts of scholarly attention. These studies, however, invariably focus on a particular biblical figure (such as Deborah, Judith, or Solomon), or a specific period (such as the years around Elizabeth's accession in 1558, or the aftermath of her excommunication in 1570). These various emphases mean that no single book has taken as its focus the uses of the Old Testament by both Elizabeth and her supporters across her entire reign. It is this curious lacuna that Elizabeth I and the Old Testament seeks to address.

***

The Bible was the paramount text in early modern England. As the word of God, it was believed to be prefigurative of the present. To understand how the events of the ancient past of the Old Testament could be applicable to the present, figures and events were read typologically: that is, an event in the Bible was said to reverberate down the centuries, with contemporary situations linked to a biblical event in order to understand what God had in store for His people, or to conceptualize how a situation should be handled. Thus, Edward VI supported the Reformation in England like the reforming Hebrew boy-king, Josiah; Mary I, despite being in her late thirties and early forties, would be blessed to give birth to an heir like the Old Testament matriarchs Sarah and Hannah; and parliamentarians in the Civil War of the 1640s and 1650s constantly turned to the Exodus as “the only parallel” for their situation. These typologies, however, all rely on the doctrine of providence, which held that God was not an “idle, inactive spectator upon the mechanical workings of the created world, but an assiduous, energetic deity who constantly intervened in human affairs.”