Concepts of Scripture in Maimonides 133maturity, one must abandon this study regimen in favor of exclusive devo-
tion to Talmud “in accordance with the expansiveness of his mind (heart)
and psychological composure [ yishuv daat].” When the latter state is at
its optimum, there is no longer any need to focus on the halakhic inter-
change and debate that pervades all of the Talmud — what is traditionally
understood by that corpus — and there should be unmitigated intellectual
engagement with those most esoteric of sciences known as the Accounts of
the Creation and the Chariot. What Maimonides classifi es then as “written
Torah” here is a beginner’s superfi cial familiarity with the contents of all
of Scripture, namely, its narratives and laws, while the ultimate Talmudic
enterprise is a reversion back to Scripture to elevate those superfi cial con-
tents. One accomplishes this by utilizing the Guide and the beginning of
the Mishneh Torah as linguistic compendia to expose the profound truths
buried within Scripture. Both the elementary and graduated study of Torah
involve reading the same text, but the disparity in intellectual sophistica-
tion renders entirely diff erent products.
Just as the Mishneh Torah is structurally enveloped by the paramount
endeavor of biblical interpretation, so the entire text of the Pentateuch, ac-
cording to Maimonides, is anchored in an essential relationship between
God and the world. Th is anchor must inform every interpretive encoun-
ter with the Pentateuch. Every single facet of existence, as a consequence
of God’s wisdom, is purposeful, even though we oft en fail to detect that
inherent teleological wisdom when examining its various isolated parts.
Opening and closing with this message, the Torah is imbued with the telos
of all existence, for “it is upon this opinion that the whole of the Torah
of Moses our Master is founded; it opens with it: And God saw everything
that He had made and behold it was very good (Gen. 1: 31); and it concludes
with it: Th e Rock [zur], His work is perfect, and so on (Deut. 32: 4)” (GP,
III:25, p. 506). Th ough notionally these bookend verses capture the perfec-
tion of God’s creation in which nothing is extraneous, they also demarcate
a trajectory spanning the length of the Pentateuchal text from what God
knows toward knowledge to which man must aspire. Th e all-encompassing
goodness of creation envisioned by God at the end of the primal creation is
accessible to human beings as the outermost limits of their intellect, since
this very divine perspective is revealed to Moses at the summit of intellec-
tual achievement when God passed His goodness before him (Exod. 33: 19)
(GP, I:54, p. 124). Moses grasps how all things that exist “are mutually con-
nected so that he will know how He governs them in general and in detail”