Concepts of Scripture in Maimonides 135of that cognitive eff ort determines one’s distance from God in thought.
Scripture, for the disciple of Maimonides, represents an interpretive vortex
from which both reader and text emerge in the exercise of intellect, or that
divine image which God and humanity share in common (GP, I:1, p. 21).
During Maimonides’s discussion of the meaning of “holiness” (qedu-
shah) in the Guide, he cites a rabbinic rubric exempting discussions of To-
rah from the regular halakhic prescriptions of purity that allows them to
be conducted even in a state of impurity — “Th e words of the Torah are not
subject to becoming unclean” (GP, III:47, p. 595).26 Th is rabbinic reference
serves to dispel any perception of Torah as somehow ontologically unique
or possessing some kind of inherent metaphysical quality as endorsed by
the mystical tradition. Th e Torah is important for its contents. Since ab-
stract teachings have no ontic reality outside the mind, they cannot con-
tract impurities. Th is rabbinic rubric is also crucial because it refl ects many
of the Maimonidean conceptions of Scripture discussed previously. Scrip-
ture is available for reading, deciphering, and understanding, not for in-
cantations or to provide some kind of refuge in what might be perceived
as its magical apotropaic aura simply by chanting it.27 For Maimonides,
“uncleanness” can have three senses: disobedience of commandments in
thought or action; dirt; ritual impurities contracted through, for example,
contact with dead bodies (GP, III:47, p. 595). Of these three, ritual impu-
rity and dirt must be ruled out when their converse is applied to Scripture.
Th e remaining sense of uncleanness that can be used to determine its an-
tonym (holiness) for Scripture is “disobedience and transgression of com-
mandments concerning action or opinion” (ibid.). When Maimonides’s
disciples perceive their Scripture as “holy,” what they are describing is their
own compliant response with its practical and theoretical teachings. Just
as God’s glory and presence inhere neither in the world nor in the Sanc-
tuary but are a function of human apprehension and discussion of Him
(GP, I:64, p. 157), so Scripture’s holiness resides in the human action and
thought it provokes.
Finally, we return to the maxim with which our discussion began — the
Torah speaks in the language of human beings — to explore its ramifi ca-
tions for a Maimonidean conception of Scripture. It is inextricably bound
with another rabbinic adage that Maimonides adopts to capture the liter-
ary license of the biblical authors — “Great is the power of the prophets for
they liken a form to its creator.”28 What this conveys is both the audac-
ity and confi dence of the prophets when articulating their visions of God