Nieuw Israel

An English visitor to the Netherlands in the 1650s, Owen Felltham, remarked that the Dutch were “in some sort Gods, for they set bounds to teh Sea; and when they list let it pass them. Even their dwellings is a miracle. They live lower than the fishes. In the very lap of floods, and incircled in their watry arms.” It put Felltham in mind of Israel at the Exodus: “They are the Israelites passing through the Red Sea . . . . They have struggled long with Spains Pharaoh, and they have at length inforced him to let them go.”

Dutch writers extended the comparison to draw up theocratic political proposals. In an early book, Hugo Grotius compared the United Provinces with the “Hebrew Republic,” drawing largely from Josephus.

Grotius noted that Israel was organized as a theocracy, a state where “the highest and only authority belonged to God, to whose worship all other things were made subservient,” as well as an aristocracy, and he urged that the Dutch Republic should similarly combine a theocratic ethos with an aristocratic order: “We agree with the Hebrews in that we, too, show a distinct preference and the greatest respect for the aristocratic form of government . . . . Like the Hebrew we also have three bodies, a tripartite body, so to say: we have the same kind of townships as they,k except that here the nobility is considered a sort of township of its own.”

In De Republica Hebraeorum (1617), Petrus Cunaeus made a similar argument. Addressing the States of Holland, he wrote in the preface: “I offer to your view a Commonwealth, the most holy, and the most exemplary in the Whole World. The Rise and Advance whereof, it well becomes you perfectly to understand, because it had not any mortall man for its Author and Founder, but the immortall God, that God, whose pure veneration and worship, You have undertaken, and do maintain. Here you shall see whatit was that conteined the Hebrews so long in an innocent way of life, what rais’d up their courage, cherished their concord, bridled their desires. Indeed, that people had Rules of Government, excelling the precepts of all wise men that ever were; Which rules, we have shewed, may in good part be collected out of the holy Bible.”