The scholarly tradition that cultivated seriously this form of attention was the Jewish; and from our point of view its most influential representative was Spinoza. When he drew up his rules of scriptural interpretation in the seventh chapter of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he distinguished strictly between meaning and truth (what is written and what it is written about): in exegesis “we are at work,” he said, “not on the truth of passages but on their meaning.” And he expressed a particular dislike for the practice of distorting meaning “in order to make it conform with some truth already entertained.” He neatly convicts his illustrious predecessor Maimonides of this offense, which he thinks intellectually disreputable and liable to favor political authoritarianism. The Bible, he held, “leaves reason absolutely free”; it is of divine origin, but it is accommodated to human understanding, which may ascertain its meanings, but must not confound them with truths. “It is one thing to understand the meaning of Scripture, and quite another to understand the actual truth.” Five centuries of Jewish interpretative rationalism stood behind Spinoza; but he was addressing the problems of his own day, and saw that the confusion of meaning and truth might result in the suppression of religious liberty. His pious book seemed blasphemous in 1670; so powerful is the atavistic preference for truth over meaning.
– The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1980), p. 119