This Spanish Bible is an example of the many books produced especially for newcomers to Judaism in the Sephardi community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Most of these immigrants were former conversos,descendants of Jewish converts to Catholicism who were escaping from the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. Although they were not required to convert because they identified themselves as Jewish by ancestry, the adoption of a Jewish lifestyle and participation in the Jewish community required a significant adjustment. Upon arrival, most lacked basic knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish law, and vernacular Bibles like this one were just one element of the copious literature published in Spanish and Portuguese to guide them in their new Jewish practice.

The printer of this 1661 edition of the Bible, Joseph Athias, was himself a former converso, having been born in Spain and arriving in Amsterdam only as an adult. He is best known for his well-received Hebrew edition produced in the same year, but this edition, a version of the earlier Ferrara Bible newly corrected by Samuel de Cáceres, was explicitly intended for returnees to Judaism. The prologue noted that it would benefit those who were "returning from Spain to the company of the Blessed God," and the title page, shown here, includes an illustration acknowledging the edition's intended readers' status as former conversos and their new lives as Jews. It depicts a phoenix, a symbol of the Amsterdam community since it had risen, like the mythical bird, from the ashes of its previous incarnation, i.e., Iberian Jewry. Inside this phoenix appear two groups of travelers embracing, as if they had completed a long journey apart from each other. Just as these estranged travelers met within the breast of the phoenix, so was the Spanish-speaking reader of this Bible presumed to find fellowship with other former conversos in Amsterdam.