Concepts of Scripture in Maimonides 127verse also acts as a pivotal scriptural underpinning for Maimonides’s nega-
tive theology developed in the Guide, which postulates that God can only
be known by what He is not (I:55, p. 128). Th e “explicitness” of these proof-
texts is grounded in philosophical sophistication.
Th e two pillars of Jewish faith, the existence of a creator God and of
His absolute and indivisible unity, are rooted in Scripture, but only once
the text has evolved from the apparent nonsense of its anthropomorphic
language into “explicit” profundity. Th e task of the Jewish reader is to make
Scripture speak explicitly as asserted in the Mishneh Torah (mefurash).
Reading Scripture for Maimonides is a liberating venture for both the text
and its reader. It should allow meaning to escape the pragmatic constraints
of human language, whose linguistic reach only extends to “dark and lowly
physical bodies that dwell in houses of clay and whose foundations are in
the dirt.”10 As Maimonides’s citation of this last Jobian verse implies, read-
ing Scripture also reminds the reader of his or her own inferior state vis-à-
vis the grandeur of the universe, thereby tempering reading by an ethics of
humility that curtails any self-assured mastery of the text. At the same time,
the term “clay,” or homer, the standard Hebrew term for matter as opposed
to form in the medieval Jewish philosophical lexicon, conjures up that as-
pect of the lowly existence that the reader must overcome by the exercise of
“form,” the nobler dimension, if he or she aspires to cultivate his humanity
and fi nd common ground between himself and God. If a reading does not
penetrate the external, if it does not discern the “apples of gold” from their
“silver fi ligree” casing, then existence itself will be mired in the homer that
renders it indistinguishable from animal or unrefl ective existence.
Th e Mishneh Torah concludes with its grand vision of a utopian Mes-
sianic era when uniform sociopolitical harmony and comfort are merely
the historical setting for the single universal preoccupation “to know the
Lord.”11 Th e beginning and end of the Code therefore link up in what com-
mences as the normative pursuit of the knowledge of God and culminates
in its ultimate attainment within an environment where that pursuit be-
comes the norm. But at the same time, it is bracketed by an engagement
with Scripture that allows it to speak acceptable words. Critical to Mai-
monides’s conception of the Messianic period is its location along a his-
torical continuum where the laws of nature are fully operative. It is a pro-
gressive evolution, not a caesura in the temporal fl ow initiated at creation
when the “world follows its customary course” (olam keminhago noheg). In
preparation for its eventuation, all those metahistorical prophetic visions
entailing a breach in the natural order (such as the wolf shall dwell with