Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Avicennian Theory of an Eternal World

Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Maʾamar Yiqqawu ha-mayim (completed ca. 1231) puts forward an original cosmogony, a synthesis of the thesis of ḥidduš ha-ʿolam (the world came to be ab novo after not having been) and the thesis that the world is eternal. Ibn Tibbon holds that not only the separate forms (the deity and the intelligences) are eternal, but so are the material heavenly bodies as well. The book of Genesis is to be understood not as an account of the creation of reality as a whole, but as a description of the coming-to-be of the sublunar world only. The decisive phase of this coming-to-be was the emergence (through an entirely natural process) of dry land from beneath the water that initially surrounded the terrestrial globe. Subsequently, all plants and animals, including humankind, came to be naturally. Once this process was completed, a reverse natural process set in and the terrestrial globe again became entirely covered with water, just as on the “eve of creation.” Then the same natural process of the coming to-be of the sublunar world began all over again; and so on infinitely. In other words, the process of “creation” described in Genesis was not a singular, one-time episode. Rather, Genesis describes one typical “phase” in an infinite, eternally recurring process. The life-span of each individual sublunar world is limited, but the chain of coming-to-be and destruction of successive sublunar worlds is infinite; the encompassing celestial world remains eternally selfsame. Thus each individual sublunar world is “new” (meḥuddaš), whereas the supralunar world and the series of successive sublunar worlds within it—and hence “the world” in a more general sense—have existed since all eternity. Ibn Tibbon worked out this audacious, entirely naturalistic theory on the basis of Ibn Sīnā’s natural philosophy. He also supported it from various Jewish authoritative texts, thereby showing that it was compatible with the Jewish tradition.