Balthasar BEKKER - Uitlegginge van den Propheet Daniël - 1698

[BALTHASAR BEKKER – PROPHET DANIEL – PROPHECY & APOCALYPSE – MAGICIANS AND CHALDEANS]

By the most famous opponent of witchcraft belief in early modern Europe – Bekker's commentary on the Prophet Daniel, Amsterdam 1698

"Uitlegginge van den Propheet Daniël, door Balthasar Bekker, S.T.D., Bedienaar des H. Euangeliums tot Amsterdam."

Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698)
'tAmsterdam, by Daniel van den Dalen, Boekverkoper op 't Rockin, ter zyden de Beurs, 1698. Met Privilegie voor 15 Jaren.

With the publisher's woodcut device on the title page and decorative woodcut initials.

The author. Balthasar Bekker is one of the great names in the history of the witchcraft debate. A Cartesian minister of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam, he published between 1691 and 1693 "De Betoverde Weereld" – The World Bewitched – in which he argued that the Devil has no power whatever in the material world, that spirits cannot act upon bodies, and that the whole edifice of witchcraft, possession and demonic magic rests on misreading scripture and on superstition. The book caused one of the fiercest controversies of the Dutch Golden Age, was answered by dozens of pamphlets across Europe, and cost Bekker his ministry: he was deposed by the Amsterdam consistory in 1692 and never reinstated. Historians count it among the decisive blows to the belief in witchcraft in Europe, and first editions of it are now among the most sought-after books in the whole literature of demonology.

The book. The present work is Bekker's commentary on the Prophet Daniel, published in 1698, the last year of his life, and dedicated to the reigning burgomasters of Amsterdam – among them Nicolaas Witsen, the celebrated cartographer, Russia scholar and director of the East India Company. It is a late work by a man writing under the shadow of his condemnation, and the choice of subject is a striking one: Daniel is precisely the book of the Bible in which the magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and Chaldean astrologers of Babylon are summoned before the king and fail; in which dreams and visions must be interpreted; in which a disembodied hand writes upon the wall at Belshazzar's feast; and in which the four beasts and the prophecies of the end times are unfolded – the passages from which centuries of apocalyptic and Antichrist speculation grew.

To read these chapters expounded by the very man who had denied the Devil any power in the world is a genuine curiosity of intellectual history, and the book is of real interest to anyone collecting Bekker, the Dutch Enlightenment, the early critique of magic, or biblical prophecy.

Provenance: Two Dutch ownership stamps, both from Waddinxveen: that of P. Rupke, Burgemeester (mayor) of Waddinxveen, and that of B. J. van Rhijn, Kerkweg, Waddinxveen – an attractive record of the book's later life in a Dutch municipal and private library.

Condition: Bound in brown leather with a smooth spine. Internally well preserved; the paper lightly age-toned and spotted in places, with some fraying to the fore-edge margins of the preliminaries and a small loss to the upper corner of the dedication leaf. The two ownership stamps as described above. (Please see the photographs.)

Pages: Title page + 14 p. + 280 p. + 455 p.

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