130 James A. Diamond
time,” while the affi rmation of idolatry is tantamount to the Torah’s repudi-
ation.17 Th is extends to those segments of the Torah intended to inculcate a
moral regimen in people and to construct a socially viable, politically cohe-
sive community. Ethics and theology are inseparably interlocked, since the
ideal morality is one that is a function of the supreme religious mandate to
mimic God’s governance, or what is referred to as imitatio dei. To qualify
as such, human conduct must approximate those characteristics the Torah
ascribes to God while at the same time being wary of a true conception of
God that cannot sustain such characteristics in truth. All those acts nor-
mally described by such biblical terms as merciful, compassionate, or gra-
cious, which, as a rule, are humanly motivated by emotions, “by no means
proceed from Him, may He be exalted, on account of a notion superadded
to His essence” (GP, I:54, p. 126). Th us, these attributes ascribed to God are
subject to the caveat that they do not signify any inherent qualities of God
but are rather attributes of action which are dispassionately distributed in
nature. Any other conception of the deity is idolatrous. Consequently, any
human conduct that aspires to imitatio dei based on mimicking divine acts
that emanate from innate moral traits is also idolatrous. Even conduct must
be fi ltered through the prism of knowledge of God, which will produce acts
that assimilate themselves to the extent of being considered godlike.
Th e Torah, then, is a philosophical text in its totality. Correspondingly,
the Guide is an exegetical work dedicated exclusively to providing the tools
for reading out of the Torah its philosophical subtext.18 At the same time,
it mimics the Torah in its demand for reading keys that unlock the se-
crets encrypted in its text. True to this vision of Torah, the Guide’s express
agenda is primarily “to explain the meanings of certain terms occurring in
the books of prophecy” (GP, Intro., p. 5) and secondarily to off er “the ex-
planation of very obscure parables occurring in the books of the prophets
but not explicitly identifi ed there as such” (ibid., p. 6). Th e Guide advises
its reader at the very outset that any chapter that does not patently deal
with biblical terms does so implicitly as ancillary to others which do, or
by obliquely hinting to a term intentionally suppressed for the time being.
Such chapters seemingly devoid of biblical reference might also “explain
one of the parables” or “hint at the fact that a certain story is a parable”
(ibid., p. 10). Th e Guide could have just as appropriately been titled “How
to Read the Bible.”19
Since the Mishneh Torah purports to deal exhaustively with halakhah,
what remains in Scripture to contend with is the physics and metaphysics
covertly expressed therein. In the wake of this Maimonidean revolution, a