A CRITICAL MIND 151
than to God. It is this latter notion— that true reliance on God precludes
the use of medicine— which Maimonides calls “ravings” (hadhayan). He
pours abuses on the disseminators of this notion, which he calls “a vile
statement” (qawl munhatt), adding:
According to their confused and stupid logic (ala qiyasihim al-
mukhtall al- sakhif), if a hungry man grabs bread and eats it, [an act]
which is sure to cure this painful suffering, does this mean that he
stopped relying on God?! They should be told: “You fools (ya maja-
nin)! As I thank God for the food which He provided me, which al-
leviates my hunger and sustains me, in the same way I thank Him
for providing a medicine which heals my illness when I use it.”^122The “ravings” here are not an erroneous scientifi c method, but, on the
contrary, the pious objection to scientifi c, empirical medicine. Maimo-
nides is clearly outraged by the religious notion of these people, but he
does not accuse them of blasphemy. He brands them as upholding “rav-
ings,” in that they propound a way of thinking that does not take into
account the empirical knowledge of how things are.
The second example comes from the Commentary on the Mishnah,
Sanhedrin, where Maimonides attempts to defi ne the “external books”
(sefarim ha-hitzoniyyim), the reading of which qualifi es one as epiqoros.
As we have seen above, among these books he lists the books of BenSirah,
who, he says, “was a man who composed ravings (hadhayan) about the
meaning of physiognomy (fi rasa).”^123
In this passage, the word “ravings” applies specifi cally to a written
text. For Maimonides, Ben Sirah’s book falls into the category of useless
books that serve only to idle away one’s time. To this category belong
also Arabic books of poems, genealogy, and history. But the books on
physiognomy are also “ravings,” because they falsely claim to contain
factual, scientifi c knowledge.
The fact that the word “ravings” carries special meaning in Maimonides’
thought was fi rst noticed by Samuel Ibn Tibbon, who found it necessary
to explain it in his Lexicon of Foreign Words. According to Ibn Tibbon,
hazayya (the phonetically close Hebrew translation he chose for had-
hayan) is a verbal noun derived from “hozim” (as in Isa. 56:10): that is,
“those who say senseless things, which have no connection to reality, like
(^122) Commentary on the Mishnah, Moed, 177– 78.
(^123) Commentary on the Mishnah, Sanhedrin, 209– 210; and see chap. 4, note 110, above.
Maimonides probably indeed has in mind Ecclesiasticus, the discovery of the original He-
brew version of which in Cairo, in the late nineteenth century, initiated the modern interest
in the Cairo Geniza.