Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Creation as Parable in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed
2 5 9
Creation as Parable in Maimonides’
Guide of the Perplexed
Ro s ly n We i s s
Lehigh University
rw03@lehigh.edu
In his Introduction to the Guide of the Perplexed (quotations
from the Guide are from Pines 1963, occasionally modified slightly), Maimonides
tells his readers that both the Account of the Beginning (Genesis
1), which he identifies as physics, and the Account of the Chariot (Ezekiel 1),
which he identifies as divine science or metaphysics (Intro., 6, 9; also 1.34:77;
in his rabbinic works: MT, Yesodei haTorah 2:11, 4:10-13; Commentary on
the Mishnah, Ḥagigah 2:1), are parables. It is perhaps unsurprising that Maimonides
regards the Account of the Chariot as mythical or symbolic: since
Ezekiel has a vision, what he sees is, in some obvious sense, imagistic and
thus in need of decoding. But why does Maimonides say that the account of
creation in Genesis is a parable? It contains no images per se. The language
is quite plain. There is what seems to be a straightforward account of how the
world came into being—it is not, after all, an account of how one man saw
it or dreamed it, nor does it appear in a book of parables. And although to
be sure we cannot know what it means to say that “God spoke and the world
was” (as the shaḥarit liturgy puts it), there is nothing manifestly “parabolic”
about it. The aim of this paper is to discern what it means for Maimonides to
regard as a parable something that is not manifestly one. The Account of the
Beginning, inasmuch as it lacks the features of dreams and visions, contains
no poetic or metaphorical language, and does not obviously point beyond
itself, qualifies as one such parable. (My understanding of parable as a narrative
whose literal sense is symbolic of, stands for, or simply corresponds
to, and thus stands in for, something else differs from Josef Stern’s [1998,
10] broader one, according to which it denotes anything—not only texts but
commandments—that has multiple layers of meaning. As I shall point out
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