Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Creation as Parable in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed
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to be Maimonides’ “first purpose”is said to be the and “chief aim,” respectively.
It is likely, however, that the sense of “first” in the Guide’s Introduction
is its chronological one—and indeed, the first thing Maimonides does in the
Guide is explain terms. The “first” that appears in the Introduction to Part
3, however, surely means first in importance, and is thus equivalent to 2.29’s
“chief.” We are in fact told at 2.30:348 that “first” is an ambiguous term: in
one of its senses it signifies priority in time, in another, it means aprincipal
principle. Surely in yet a third it means first in importance.
Considering that Maimonides in his Introduction informs
the Guide’s readers that this work contains only “chapter headings” and that
“even those are not set down in order…but rather are scattered and entangled
with other subjects…” (6), we may justifiably proceed to collect the relevant
assertions from various parts of the Guide and conclude that (1) the kind of
parable that chiefly occupies Maimonides is the kind that is not obviously a
parable, (2) his intention is to explain what can be explained of the Account
of the Beginning and the Account of the Chariot, and (3) the Account of the
Beginning and the Account of the Chariot are parables. If we then add to
these the observation that (4) the Account of the Chariot is a parable that
is “explicitly identified as a parable,” what emerges is that it is primarily the
Account of the Beginning that Maimonides will be explaining in the Guide.
What exactly Maimonides means by “explaining” a parable will become
clearer at the paper’s close.
In light of Maimonides’ declaration that one of his two
primary intents in the Guide is to explain biblical parables that are obscure
and not evidently parables, the new distinction he draws (Guide, Intro., 12)
between parables in which each term is significant and parables in which it is
the larger whole that matters can have only secondary significance. Indeed,
the examples Maimonides uses to illustrate respectively the two types of
parable distinguished in this new way are both parables of the evident type
and hence not illustrative of parables that are explicitly his main concern
in the Guide. The first is a dream, and the second appears in a book that
contains what are essentially parables: the biblical book Proverbs. For each,
Maimonides provides a rather open and thorough analysis: in the case of
Jacob’s vision of the ladder upon which angels ascend and descend (Gen. 28),
a parable in which, as he claims, each term is significant, that analysis can
be found in two passages, 1.15:41 and 2.10:272; and in the case of the parable
of the harlot in Prov. 7, which is one in which not every term merits careful
attention, the analysis is found in the Introduction (13). With respect to the