ABSTRACT
Jean Bodin is a French Renaissance thinker who contributes to historiography, jurisprudence, comparative religion, demonology, natural theology, political philosophy, and economics. On one hand, one might argue from such evidence that Bodin's knowledge of Judaism might be attributed to his reading of Hebrew texts; on the other hand, very few Christian students of Hebraica gained from reading alone such a closeness to a Jewish view of the patriarchs of Genesis. Bodin's biblical view that the created universe and the work of the sixth day, human beings, are tov meod is the fundamental source for his need to explain natural disaster and human wrongdoing as brought about by demons. Bodin's view that God has provided human nature with the potentiality for virtue, truth, and piety is the inner functional epistemology upon which his human, natural, and divine types of history attain unity.
