Il Mosè di Spinoza: Liberatore o tiranno?

Spinoza’s Moses: Liberator or Tyrant? The figure of Moses recurs within Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise within the discussions of all the key themes of the work: prophecy, election, law narratives, miracles, and so on. Yet Spinoza’s uses of this figure are not always consistent, and readings of it offered by interpreters can be deeply discordant. Reviewing the places in which Spinoza appeals to Moses as a prophet and as a lawgiver, the present article aims to highlight the tensions that run through this variety of uses both on the epistemological and on the ethical-political level, and to show how these tensions force us to abandon, in reading Spinoza’s work, a rigid assumption of coherence.