What is Scripture? In a sense, the entire Theologico-Political Treatise constitutes an answer to this question. But to say what something is, is not immediately the same thing as explaining what its being is, or what kind of being it has. Spinoza obviously accepts that, one way or another, Scripture is a being. And he certainly agrees with Leibniz that, in order for there to be being, there must necessarily be a being. Scripture qua being therefore has a unity that confers upon it a certain individuality. But it is well known that in Part II of the Ethics Spinoza explains to us what he understands by individual: an individual, he tells us in the definition that follows Proposition 13, is any set of bodies that is held together, or which, if they are displaced in relation to one another, reciprocally communicate their movements according to a well-determined law. Now can one really say that Scripture, or for that matter any human work in general, literary or otherwise, has individuality in this sense? That seems absurd. And yet, in fact, one can say just this. It is true that, at first glance, it can only be said in a metaphoric sense: this is what emerges from the very principles of Spinozist exegesis such as they are elaborated in Chapter VII of the TTP. But we will see that Chapter XII provides us with the means to grant Scripture the ontological status of an individual in the literal sense.

Let us begin with the metaphoric sense. In a certain way, what constitutes the unity of Scripture is explained to us in Chapter VII. This unity, at first glance, is not immediately visible: the books that constitute Scripture have very different natures, they were written at very different times, and they respond to very different concerns. Their unity, at least superficially, might appear as the product of an arbitrary historical decision: the Pharisees of the second temple for the Old Testament, and certain councils for the New, decided at some point to unify all these books into a single corpus. But those who made this decision obviously had their reasons for doing so: these books are all one, they thought, because they express the Word of God.