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123 Chapter 8 Concepts of Scripture in Maimonides James A. Diamond There is virtually no facet of present-day Judaism that does not bear the imprint of the formidable intellectual legacy of Moses ben Maimon (1138– 1204), whether it be in Jewish law (halakha), rabbinics, theology, philosophy , or biblical interpretation. Even the mystical tradition’s (kabbala) inventive re-readings of Scripture can be seen as a negative reaction to his overpowering rationalist approach. He was a first in many respects. No fundamental tenets of Judaism to which Jews must subscribe existed prior to his introduction of thirteen articles of faith, what have since been generally assented to as the Jewish creed. He pioneered the first code of Jewish law (Mishneh Torah), organizing and systematizing what had previously been a vast rabbinic morass that only the most skilled Talmudist could possibly navigate. After assimilating much of the philosophical/scientific tradition of his day, as transmitted through Islamic sources, he authored the single most important and influential reconciliation between the Torah, Judaism’s foundational document, and reasoned demonstrated truths with which it apparently conflicted. That treatise, titled the Guide of the Perplexed, continues to vex, challenge, inspire, provoke, and stimulate any serious discussion or thought since, addressing apparent dichotomies between religious texts, faith, and science. All of this he accomplished while leading his Jewish community in old Cairo and practicing medicine, acquiring an outstanding reputation as a physician in no less than Saladin’s court. The intellectual enterprise of reconciling reason and faith, or what has been referred to as Athens and Jerusalem, was not unique to Maimonides, who had his counterparts in Christianity and Islam as well. The names he was known by alternatively to the three traditions—Maimonides, Rambam , Musa ibn Maymun—attest also to the influence he had on all them, 124 James A. Diamond thus affording him a seminal place in the history of religious thought in general. A lengthy and complex tradition of biblical interpretation within Judaism preceded Maimonides, but it was primarily applied to law, ethics, and narrative gaps and anomalies in the Hebrew Bible. Since that biblical text on its face challenges virtually everything Maimonides held to be demonstrably true of the world and God, developing a fresh approach to it, devising sophisticated reading strategies, and establishing a new dictionary of biblical terms that could accommodate the “truth” were the centerpieces of his undertaking. In this sense, he radically advanced the history of biblical interpretation. Whether one opposed or agreed with Maimonides, the Hebrew Bible could never be read in the same way again.1 In the quest for human perfection which, for Maimonides, consists of whatever is attainable of the knowledge of the divine, Scripture is the textual bridge between God, the objective zenith of all knowledge, and His knowing subjects. This textual bridge, however, is littered with anthropomorphic descriptions of God that threaten to lead these subjects astray. Maimonides’s characterization of scriptural language is most aptly captured by his adoption of a rabbinic hermeneutical maxim, whose application is subject to earlier rabbinic controversy,2 that “the Torah speaks in the language of human beings” (dibrah torah kelashon bnei adam). What this implies for him is that there is a stark dichotomy between the Torah’s true, sublime, abstract, and universal ideas and the deceptively mundane, crude, and parochial means by which it communicates them. Maimonides transformed what for the rabbis had been an exegetically conservative approach that constrained rabbinic interpretive latitude3 with respect to biblical language into one that nurtures interpretive expansiveness to liberate esoteric truth from its mundane articulation. Paradoxically, Scripture’s graphic portrayal of divine activity and being relate to human conceptions of perfection (language of human beings) while at the same time constructing an anthropomorphic edifice of unmitigated imperfection—“everything that the multitude consider a perfection is predicated of Him, even if it is only a perfection in relation to ourselves —for in relation to Him, may he be exalted, all things that we consider perfections are the very extreme of deficiency” (GP, I:26, p. 56).4 To cite but one example, Scripture applies motion to God, since lack of it in a human context is considered a disability and to deny God this function would upset the notion of divine perfection as understood by those who are philosophically unseasoned. However, to take Scripture at its word on this or any other physical capacity is to corrupt the notion of an incorporeal [3.145.60.166] Project MUSE...

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