This illuminating new study considers the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how the religious text provided a key language of political debate and played a critical role in shaping early modern political thinking. Kevin Killeen demonstrates how biblical kings were as important in the era's political thought as any classical model. The book mines the rich and neglected resources of early modern quasi-scriptural writings - treatise, sermon, commentary, annotation, poetry and political tract - to show how deeply embedded this political vocabulary remained, across the century, from top to bottom and across all religious positions. It shows how constitutional thought, in this most tumultuous era of civil war, regicide and republic, was forged on the Bible, and how writers ranging from King James, Joseph Hall or John Milton to Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes can be better understood in the context of such vigorous biblical discourse.

'Through deep research this book uncovers the far-reaching yet surprisingly neglected contribution of the Bible to the political thinking of early-modern England, from justifications for regicide to responsibility for plague victims: a wide-ranging and illuminating work.'

Paul Hammond - University of Leeds

'An important supplement, and corrective, to recent scholarship on the Classical-republican foundations of early modern political thought. Killeen's magisterial study of how seventeenth-century Englishmen read their Old Testament, with its often murderous and often murdered kings, both illuminates and defamiliarizes the era's discourses of liberty and oppression, property and prerogative, divine right and prophetic defiance.'

Debora Shuger - University of California, Los Angeles