Concepts of Scripture in Maimonides 125unifi ed Being that is the Maimonidean God. Th at Maimonidean deity al-
lows for no commonality whatsoever with existence as human beings
know and experience it. Th erefore the Jew’s encounter with his or her sa-
cred foundational text is fraught with an irresolvable tension between, on
the one hand, discarding the text and extracting the philosophically pure
notion masked by it and, on the other, preserving its original Sinaitic form
intact. Aft er all, Maimonides endorses what he interprets to be a rabbinic
dictum that bifurcates scriptural parables between an internal layer of in-
calculable value and an external that “is worth nothing” (GP, Intro., p. 11).
At the same time, he also mandates a dogmatic belief in the authenticity of
the Torah that remains forever unalterable. Th is he posits as a fundamental
principle of Judaism, the denial of which is tantamount to resignation of a
Jew’s membership in the Jewish nation.5
Medieval theologians and philosophers conducted their investigations
and discourse in the shadow of a world largely constructed by a now out-
dated physics and astronomy that remained regnant science since Aristotle,
its founding father. Th e question then arises as to the continuing relevance
of Maimonides’s interpretive project in his Guide of the Perplexed. If all that
project amounts to is providing the tools for excavating this antiquated
Aristotelian science and ancient cosmology from beneath Scripture’s an-
thropomorphic surface, of what value is it to the contemporary reader of
Scripture? However, the two questions Maimonides took great pains to an-
swer continue to vex modern Jewish readers of the Bible. Th e fi rst is the
hermeneutical inquiry into the precise nature of the biblical text and its
peculiar language, and the second is the existential quandary of how to re-
main loyal to both intellect and tradition without resorting to an either/or
choice of renouncing one in favor of the other.6 Th e hermeneutical agenda
he set for a Jewish approach to reading Scripture has withstood the mount-
ing scientifi c revolutions since his time, remaining as urgent and demand-
ing as it ever was.7 What stimulated Maimonides’s twelft h-century disciple
R. Joseph, the private addressee of the Guide, whose longing to fi nd out ac-
ceptable words (Eccles. 12:10, p. 4) drove their master-student relationship,
is as stimulating to twenty-fi rst-century students of the Bible. Th e original
biblical acceptable words discovered by Solomon, the traditional author of
Ecclesiastes, are the exposition of parables (meshalim) of the previous verse
(12:9), which he subjected to close scrutiny (‘izzen ve-hiqer) in order to
teach the people knowledge (limmed da’at et ha-am). Joseph’s own striving
for acceptable words draws him into the camp of that rare breed of person
whom Maimonides, in the introduction to his thirteen principles of faith,