142 Aaron W. Hughes
their work, singling them out as his predecessors, Nahmanides eff ectively
created a triumvirate that, in the words of Isadore Twersky, “still casts its
shadow over all Bible study.”8 Th is triumvirate, which came to form the
core of the sixteenth-century “Rabbinic Bible,” the miqraot gedolot, eff ec-
tively set out the exegetical problems and issues for the subsequent history
of Jewish biblical exegesis.
Nahmanides’s commentary combines all the major streams of medieval
Jewish intellectual life: rabbanism, philosophy, and mysticism. In terms of
rabbinic thought, Nahmanides emphasized the importance of tradition,
based as it was on the infallibility of the ancient sages known as the tan-
naim and the amoraim. Nahmanides’s relationship to philosophy, however,
is a more complicated matter. Although he is oft en held up as the antithesis
of the rationalism of Maimonides, such a characterization overlooks the
many places in his commentary where he smoothly integrates philosophy.
Nahmanides’s commentary is best known for its use of elements drawn
from the kabbalah, a newly emerging mystical tradition that was associ-
ated with esoteric circles in northern Spain but that claimed to go back to
Sinai and beyond. Th is new/old wisdom emphasized the mystical dimen-
sions of the biblical narrative and the role of its language, Hebrew, in the
process of creation. Its letters were not simply words on a page but cosmic
principles ontologically connected to the divine presence. Nahmanides
was one of the fi rst thinkers to combine these teachings with the genre
of sustained biblical commentary. Although his commentary may lack the
“mystical systematization” of classic works such as the Zohar, it neverthe-
less did much to introduce, legitimize, and disseminate kabbalistic teach-
ings to a large audience. Perhaps more than anyone, Nahmanides played
a crucial role in enhancing the kabbalah’s respectability and broadening
its appeal.
It seems that Nahmanides originally wrote his commentary to the Torah
as a way to interest the Jews in Jerusalem and the land of Israel more gen-
erally in the Bible. In the aft ermath of the persecutions of the Crusading
armies, these communities needed comfort in the face of displacement and
uncertainty. Unlike other commentators who stressed scripture’s rational
or peshat (literal) dimension, Nahmanides holds that it is a dynamic text
that unfolds before the reader on multiple levels. In his view and the her-
meneutic that emerges from it, neither a monolithic rationalist nor peshat
reading does the Torah, in its textual or cosmic totality, justice. Since he
conceives of the Torah as a mystical, philosophical, literal, historical, and