Resemblances between Hebrew and Egyptian worship could be explained in opposite directions. Some Christian scholars treated Egyptian practices as corrupted borrowings from the biblical people. John Spencer (1630–1693) asked whether the law of Moses had instead responded to customs the Israelites already knew from Egypt. In De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus, his study of Hebrew ritual laws, historical circumstances helped explain why revelation had taken the form it did.
The argument began with the people receiving the law. They had habits, expectations, and memories of worship that legislation could not simply ignore. God might redirect a familiar practice toward a different purpose, or prescribe a rite that deliberately opposed an Egyptian one. Similarity and contrast could both become intelligible once the law was understood as instruction addressed to a particular community.
Spencer offered this as a defence of divine wisdom. Adapting commands to their recipients need not make them less divine. It could explain why an all-knowing lawgiver chose practices that otherwise seemed obscure or arbitrary. Egyptian religion therefore acquired an active role in his reading of Scripture, as part of the world to which the biblical law responded.
Other readers could accept the historical relationship without accepting Spencer’s account of God’s purpose. The same comparisons could support an explanation of ritual as a human inheritance. His argument had made the circumstances of revelation relevant to its interpretation, and those circumstances could be investigated independently of his theology. The question was no longer simply whether religions resembled one another. It was which people had learned from which, and what such learning meant for a claim to divine instruction.