124 James A. Diamond
thus aff ording him a seminal place in the history of religious thought in
general. A lengthy and complex tradition of biblical interpretation within
Judaism preceded Maimonides, but it was primarily applied to law, ethics,
and narrative gaps and anomalies in the Hebrew Bible. Since that biblical
text on its face challenges virtually everything Maimonides held to be de-
monstrably true of the world and God, developing a fresh approach to it,
devising sophisticated reading strategies, and establishing a new dictionary
of biblical terms that could accommodate the “truth” were the centerpieces
of his undertaking. In this sense, he radically advanced the history of bibli-
cal interpretation. Whether one opposed or agreed with Maimonides, the
Hebrew Bible could never be read in the same way again.1
In the quest for human perfection which, for Maimonides, consists of
whatever is attainable of the knowledge of the divine, Scripture is the tex-
tual bridge between God, the objective zenith of all knowledge, and His
knowing subjects. Th is textual bridge, however, is littered with anthropo-
morphic descriptions of God that threaten to lead these subjects astray.
Maimonides’s characterization of scriptural language is most aptly cap-
tured by his adoption of a rabbinic hermeneutical maxim, whose applica-
tion is subject to earlier rabbinic controversy,2 that “the Torah speaks in the
language of human beings” (dibrah torah kelashon bnei adam). What this
implies for him is that there is a stark dichotomy between the Torah’s true,
sublime, abstract, and universal ideas and the deceptively mundane, crude,
and parochial means by which it communicates them. Maimonides trans-
formed what for the rabbis had been an exegetically conservative approach
that constrained rabbinic interpretive latitude3 with respect to biblical lan-
guage into one that nurtures interpretive expansiveness to liberate esoteric
truth from its mundane articulation.
Paradoxically, Scripture’s graphic portrayal of divine activity and be-
ing relate to human conceptions of perfection (language of human beings)
while at the same time constructing an anthropomorphic edifi ce of unmit-
igated imperfection — “everything that the multitude consider a perfection
is predicated of Him, even if it is only a perfection in relation to ourselves
— for in relation to Him, may he be exalted, all things that we consider
perfections are the very extreme of defi ciency” (GP, I:26, p. 56).4 To cite
but one example, Scripture applies motion to God, since lack of it in a hu-
man context is considered a disability and to deny God this function would
upset the notion of divine perfection as understood by those who are
philosophically unseasoned. However, to take Scripture at its word on this
or any other physical capacity is to corrupt the notion of an incorporeal