John Locke's Political Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible

John Locke's political treatises repeatedly cite the Hebrew Bible while almost never citing the New Testament, a pattern earlier Locke scholarship has largely passed over. Yechiel Leiter argues that this "political Hebraism" is not incidental: the core concepts of Locke's Two Treatises of Government — equality, the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, government by popular consent, the rule of law, and the right to revolution — were derived first from the Hebrew Scriptures.

The book situates Locke within a longer tradition of Christian Hebraism and argues that recognizing this grounding resolves several long-standing interpretive debates about his political thought.