148 Aaron W. Hughes
exhausted with one hermeneutic — for example, literal, rationalist, or even
mystical. Th is is what other commentators had done, some to great eff ect,
but none succeeded in reading, according to him, the Torah in all its splen-
dor. Th is is why Nahmanides was engaged in a constant, and oft en highly
critical, conversation with his predecessors such as Rashi and Abraham Ibn
Ezra and even his contemporaries such as David Kimhi (1160 – 1235).23
In order to get both a further and better sense of Nahmanides’s concep-
tion of scripture, it is necessary to examine his commentary in counter-
point with others’. How he diff ers from previous commentaries — espe-
cially, Maimonides, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and Rashi — will ideally permit for
a clearer articulation of Nahmanides’s conception of the Torah and, by ex-
tension, his uniqueness.
Wrestling with Maimonides
As witnessed in the previous chapter, Maimonides is perhaps the most
important and infl uential Jew in the premodern period. His works, along
with interpretations of them and reactions to them by subsequent thinkers,
were responsible for the formation of many trajectories within medieval
Jewish intellectual and religious cultures. Nahmanides, as we have seen,
was on one level critical of Maimonidean allegory, something that he felt
subverted the literal and traditional reading of the Torah. In the opening
pages of his commentary, for example, Nahmanides takes aim at those who
believe, in Aristotelian fashion, that the world is eternal. Instead he makes
creatio ex nihilo into “a root of the faith” and says that “he who does not be-
lieve in this and thinks the world was eternal denies the essential principle
of the religion and has no Torah at all.”24
Belief in creation, for Nahmanides, is the foundation of Judaism, for
creation is the event that established the relationships among God, the
world, Hebrew, and the Jewish people. Interestingly, Nahmanides does not
simply counter a belief in the eternality of the universe with a literal read-
ing of Genesis but instead argues that creation is a “deep mystery not to be
understood from the verses, and it cannot truly be known except through
the tradition going back to Moses our teacher who received it through the
mouth of the Almighty.”25 Although he does not explicitly mention Mai-
monides here, it is certainly telling that he begins his commentary with a
sharp criticism of an approach to scripture that imports foreign ideas onto
the biblical narrative. True understanding of scripture, as Nahmanides