Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Creation as Parable in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed
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majority of cases when it interprets the Talmud in a superficial manner
and destroys the literal sense of the text. One should not think,
however, that I, in any way, Heaven forbid, actually believe them or
what they stand for. Rather, it is the case that everything written proceeds
according to its literal sense yet all of these things have within
them a hidden essence—not the meaning of the philosophers who toss
[the literal sense of the text] into the refuse, but the [inner essence] of
the masters of truth.
Although the above passage refers specifically to the interpretation
of Talmudic texts, it applies as well to the biblical text. As Eliyahu
Stern explains (2008, 19-23, with notes), the Vilna Gaon often interpreted
the Torah’s text figuratively, but believed at the same time that no word in
it is solely aesthetic or poetic. The Vilna Gaon would thus be objecting specifically
to Maimonides’ distinction between parables in which each word
requires interpretation and parables in which some terms may be regarded
as poetic embellishments. So, for example, whereas the Vilna Gaon follows
Maimonides in rejecting the implausible notion that Jonah was literally
eaten by a whale and survived inside its stomach for days on end, reading it
instead as an allegory about the human soul, his hermeneutic differs from
Maimonides’ in that it never ignores the specific wording of the Jonah text.
On the contrary, the Vilna Gaon justifies and explains the meaning of each
and every word and verse, offering an account of why it, and it alone, could
have been employed to express the allegorical idea in question. Maimonides,
by contrast, as we see, permits himself, when he deems it appropriate, to omit
from his allegorical accounts those elements of the text that strike him as
superfluous or imprecise. (I thank Eliyahu Stern for his helpful elucidation of
the Vilna Gaon’s hermeneutic divergence from Maimonides.)
Let us, then, suppose that Maimonides’ most pressing aim
in the Guide is to explain the obscure parable that is not obviously a parable,
namely, the Account of the Beginning. That the issue of the world’s creation
or eternity is the primary concern of the Guide should not take us by surprise.
For, not only does Maimonides devote considerable space in the Guide
to this matter, but he also makes it clear that the very character of the world
depends on it: if the world is created it is a world of miracles, hope, and fear;
if not, it is fully natural: there are no miracles, and there is no reason to hope
for reward or to fear retribution (2.25:328).
This is not to say, however, that Maimonides thinks that
in a universe that is eternal there is no room at all for the Law (the Torah).
Rather, it would seem, he recognizes two distinct conceptions of the Law that