Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Creation as Parable in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed
2 7 1
peshat whose relation to the truth is as silver filigree to golden apple, they
heaped layer upon layer of non-porous coatings on the few grains of core they
extracted. Their goal was clearly to keep people so engrossed in the layers of
rind that they would not suspect that there lay beneath them a few grains, and
certainly not that these few grains trace their own origins back to a solid core.
As Maimonides says in 3.43, with respect to the midrashim: “Those who
understand their [the Sages’] discourses” see these midrashim as “political
conceits; they are not meant to bring out the meaning of the text in question”
(572-73). There are some among those who imagine that the Sages indeed
intend to explain the meaning of the text in question who therefore accord
to the midrashim “the same status as traditional legal decisions.” There are
others who, recognizing that what the midrashim say “is not the meaning
of the text in question,” simply ridicule the midrashim. In truth, however, a
midrash “is a most witty poetical conceit” by means of which the Sages seek
to instill “a noble moral quality,” supporting it “through reference to a biblical
text, as is done in poetical compositions” (573).
The Guide’s Introduction contains a similar analysis of the
various approaches to midrash: “an ignoramus…would find nothing difficult
in them, inasmuch as a rash fool, devoid of any knowledge of the nature of
being, does not find impossibilities hard to accept. If, however, a perfect man
of virtue should engage in speculation on them, he cannot escape one of two
courses: either he can take the speeches in question in their external sense
and, in so doing, think ill of their author and regard him as an ignoramus—
in this there is nothing that would upset the foundations of belief; or he can
attribute to them an inner meaning, thereby extricating himself from his
predicament and enabling himself to think well of the author whether or not
the inner meaning is clear to him” (10). Note that here, too, as in the case of
the parables of the Law, in order to think well of the midrashim it is sufficient
to recognize that they have an inner meaning; one need not know what the
internal meaning is.
Let us turn now to 2.25, where Maimonides defends his professed
belief that the world was created (see also 1.71, 2.6, 2.13, 3.10). (The
question of whether Maimonides sincerely believed the world was created
or secretly harbored an Aristotelian belief in the world’s eternity has generated
voluminous discussion. Among the pivotal scholarly contributions to
this question are Klein-Braslavy 1968; W. Harvey 1981; Dunphy 1989; Ivry
1982; Wolfson 1973; Ravitsky 1966; Nuriel 1964; Hyman 1987; Glücker 1959;
and Loberbaum 2002.) That there has been no definitive demonstration of