ABSTRACT
Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) was forced by his commitment to Protestantism to leave Italy in 1542, taking up the chair in Old Testament at Strasbourg. He later taught at Oxford and Zurich. In his biblical commentaries, he treated the problems of whether Christians were permitted to wage war, the correct ways in which wars should be undertaken, and the correct ways in which they should be fought: many of his positions on war became fundamental to Reformed scholasticism. Vermigli’s commentary on 2 Samuel 2 may be found in Robert Kingdon’s anthology of Vermigli’s political writings. The excerpt presented here is from Vermigli’s commentary on Genesis 14, which was first given as lectures in Strasbourg in the 1540s. We use the second edition of the commentary, In Primum Librum Mosis, qui vulgo Genesis dicitur, Commentarii doctissimi D. Petri Martyris Vermilii Florentini (Zurich, 1579) as our text.
