Biblia Americana

Cotton Mather´s commentaries on Proverbs to Jeremiah are a treasure-trove for scholars interested in the development of Reformed theology and biblical interpretation during the early Enlightenment. Mather engages with issues of translation and questions about authorship, provenance, and genre, especially with regard to the three books ascribed to King Solomon. In turn, the annotations on Isaiah and Jeremiah are crucially concerned with the relevance of the Hebrew prophets for the claims of Christian theology. The volume shows the struggle of exegetes in Mather´s generation to adjust traditional interpretations of the Old Testament to a growing awareness of the Scriptures´ historicity. Many of the entries also reveal a new „Baconian“ concern with demonstrating the factual realism of the Bible by recourse to empirical evidence and the natural sciences.