Concepts of Scripture in Maimonides 129are exchanged for a blend of laws and narratives better suited to preserve
those principles which Abraham’s literary strategy failed to do.
Maimonides describes the new measures God took, via Moses at the
time of Egyptian enslavement, to salvage Abraham’s teachings. From these
measures, we can determine what elements those Abrahamic books lacked
so that it could not gain the timelessness Scripture did — “He crowned them
with mitzvoth and showed them the way to worship Him and how to deal
with idolatry and those who go astray aft er it.”15 Law, ritual, and sanctions
for transgression are the hallmarks of the Torah, the revised edition, so to
speak, of Abraham’s publications, which not only responds to the crisis of
the moment but also guarantees its survival because it has been psycho-
logically, socially, and politically adapted to withstand the vicissitudes of
human nature. Th e Guide apprises us of a fourth ingredient — the parable
— which externally might convey practical or political wisdom while inter-
nally signaling “beliefs concerned with the truth as it is” (GP, Intro., p. 12).
Th e Torah, then, is neither the midrashic blueprint for the universe nor
the kabbalistic mind or body of God but rather is a document that is thor-
oughly human in its concerns and language. In that spirit, all its prohibi-
tive and prescriptive regulations are draft ed to promote “the welfare of the
soul and the welfare of the body,” the former entailing individual intellec-
tual perfection and the latter an ideal corporate political body (GP, III:27,
p. 510). But its humanity rather than its divinity is ingrained even deeper
when it buttresses these laws with incentives and sanctions that encourage
obedience and deter disobedience. Th ough it is within God’s capacity to
populate the world with perfectly obedient human beings, “He has never
willed to do it, nor shall He ever will it” (GP, III:32, p. 529). Such thorough-
going moral and intellectual consistency would run contrary to human na-
ture, and “God does not change at all the nature of human individuals by
means of miracles” (ibid.). Th us, the entire legislative and narrative compo-
nents of the Torah in their systematic appeal to the human sensibility are
testaments to both God’s self-imposed restraint from interfering with na-
ture and humanity’s enduring process of overcoming its own foibles along
a path of becoming rather than simply stagnant being.
Scripture, in its entirety, is intended as a textual preservative for the
“fundamental principle implanted by Abraham,” of God’s existence, unity,
creation, governance, and exclusivity, whose existence precludes the possi-
bility of any other God.16 Both in the Guide and the Mishneh Torah, the de-
nial of idolatry is tantamount to the fulfi llment “of the entire Torah, all the
prophets and everything they were commanded from Adam to the end of