The Times has a nice discussion up about the first compete Hebrew translation of Hobbes’ magnum opus, involving an assortment of Israeli and American academics.
Two puzzles present themselves in all this: first, why was Hobbes so attached to the Hebrew Bible? Second, why has he only be half translated in the past, and why where the part left out left out–i.e., why did the previous Israeli version exclude so much quotation and analysis originally from Hebrew?
There’s no real consensus across the five authors. However, the answer to the first seems roughly to be that the Hobbesian project involved setting aside a great deal of existing Ancient Greek scholarship. Hebrew was an available ancient tradition to turn to. The core metaphor of the work, after all, is the sea monster from Job.
This gives us little purchase on the second, however. The to exclusions were a series of quotations from the Old Testament and the latter two sections of the book–that is, those tied to Christian morality.
In short, the book was fairly radically secularized. The five who assessed this for the times don’t seem to know why in any conclusive or agreed way. Leviathan is, of course, rather long book, and there is plenty to complain about in Hobbes, if you’re so inclined. Much of its most important argumentation can be reduced to a few sentences. The question this raises, then, is why the rest of the book is there to begin with. At least Hebrew speaking scholars and students will now have a chance to answer this for themselves.