Leviathan (Auster novel) building accidentally went off. According to the forensic reports that have just been published, the man was killed instantly. His body burst into dozens of small pieces, and fragments of his corpse were found as far as fifty feet away from the site of the explosion. —"Leviathan" Through his own investigations, the narrator attempts to answer questions as to who the man was who blew himself up, why he was found with a homemade bomb, and what circumstances brought him to a violent end. "Leviathan" is borrowed from the biblical sea monster that Thomas Hobbes used as a metaphor for
Biblical criticism scholar James A. Herrick says even though most scholars agree that biblical criticism evolved out of the German Enlightenment, there are also histories of biblical scholarship that have found "strong direct links" with British deism. Herrick references the theologian Henning Graf Reventlow as saying deism included the humanist world view, which has also been significant in biblical criticism. Some scholars, such as Gerhard Ebeling (1912–2001), Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), and Ernst Käsemann (1906–1998) trace biblical criticism's origins to the Reformation. Three early scholars of the Reformation era who helped lay the foundations of modern biblical criticism were Joachim Camerarius (1500–1574), Hugo