While Surenhusius’s Mishnah volumes have been celebrated as a landmark achievement, less praise has been given to their successor, the 1713 Sefer ha-Mashveh, long seen as a strange and difficult text. And yet, in many ways the Sefer ha-Mashveh was the culmination of Surenhusuis’s work on the Mishnah, the practical demonstration of the value that he saw in the study of rabbinic texts for Christian scholarship. This chapter provides the first full account of Surenhusius’s aims and achievements in writing the Sefer ha-Mashveh, and examines how it responded to the more recent challenges posed to orthodox Reformed beliefs about scripture. Such an account is valuable not just for what it can tell us about Surenhusius, but also for the insights it grants into the vexed historiographical question of the status of biblical scholarship in the ‘early Enlightenment’, and the role that Jewish thinkers, texts, and ideas played in the broader development of modern or ‘Enlightened’ biblical criticism.
