128 James A. Diamond
the lamb [Isa. 11:6]) must be read fi guratively, a literary strategy that itself
will be vindicated, for “in the days of King Messiah the full meaning of
those metaphors [meshalim] and their allusions will become clear to all.”12
Knowledge of God, the noblest of intellectual pursuits, is intertwined with
an appreciation for Scripture, which elevates Scripture along with its reader
and helps actualize the Messianic period. Th e nature of God and the nature
of Messiah are inextricably bound in the process of correctly deciphering
biblical language. A properly conducted understanding of such language
promotes a philosophically coherent notion of both God and the Messianic
age. Conversely, a crude literalist approach to biblical God-talk leads to a
corrupt notion of the Supreme Being which ipso facto derails the arrival
of the Messiah. Prophetic fantasies of the future must be read in the same
vein as prophetic anthropomorphisms, and so the Mishneh Torah brackets
all of human history as a constant struggle with the biblical texts.
Maimonides’s program of scriptural interpretation always looks back to-
ward its pre-Sinaitic antecedents in the attempt to recapture them. In the
Maimonidean perspective, human history from its inception did not evolve
along a linear progression of knowledge and achievement but rather could
be charted along a series of peaks and valleys determined by monotheism’s
fortunes. What began as a universal subscription to a pristine belief in and
worship of one God deteriorated into a widespread idolatrous culture in
which virtually no trace of the authentic One remained in the mind of hu-
manity. Were it not for Abraham’s sui generis retrieval of a philosophically
pure monotheism, the world would have been irrevocably doomed to theo-
logical and intellectual impoverishment. According to Maimonides, Abra-
ham discovered the existence and unity of God on his own, long before
the revelation of Torah to Moses and Israel at Sinai and thus without the
benefi t of Scripture.13 Aft er a lengthy process of vigorous internal refl ec-
tion from infancy to middle age, Abraham reasons his way toward those
truths that later become “explicitly” enshrined in the Bible. Jewish posterity
is then left with a textual legacy of his fi ndings that perpetuates his teach-
ings posthumously. However, those lost “books” authored by Abraham fail
to stem the tide of idolatrous ideology, which is so seductive as to draw
the Jews enslaved in ancient Egypt generations later tightly within its pa-
gan orbit. Scripture, for Maimonides, does not antedate the world as in the
midrashic and kabbalistic tradition14 but arrives on the historical scene to
address an urgent human predicament, a decline in the commitment to the
theological and philosophical truths which Abraham reintroduced to hu-
manity but which his written oeuvre could not sustain. Discursive treatises