"Chief of the ways of God": Form and Meaning in the Behemoth of Thomas Hobbes

Abstract

What is the point of Behemoth? Hobbes borrowed heavily from his sources - Heath's Chronicle and Husbands' collection of Civil War documents - to provide what for much of the time is a straightforward narrative interspersed with ironic commentary, often directly in reaction to the sources themselves. But those parts of the work which are not taken pretty directly from these sources reveal a more specific target - the Church of England and the universities, whose political reliability is questioned - and also suggest that Behemoth, or part of it, may have been conceived as a response to Archbishop Bramhall's attack on Leviathan of 1658.