150 Aaron W. Hughes
interpret it in such a manner that it means something diff erent? If Genesis
claims that Abraham cooked a bullock or that Sarah laughed, why should
we assume that they did not or did so only in a dream, as the Maimonidean
interpretation seems to imply? Opposed to the Maimonidean interpreta-
tion, Nahmanides contends that one cannot, indeed must not, interpret
prophetic visions solely as the products of the prophet’s imaginative faculty.
Th e issue in this debate does not simply revolve around whether Sarah
laughed. At stake is how one reads the entire biblical narrative and, accord-
ingly, the commandments that defi ne Judaism. Read from the perspective
of the later Maimonidean controversies, of which, as we have seen, Nah-
manides was intimately involved, this one example refl ects the larger issue
of what gets to count (or not) as an acceptable interpretation of the bibli-
cal text.
Another example of the debate between Maimonides and Nahmanides
may be found in their treatment of Onkelos’s “occasional” deviation from
the literal sense of the text. According to Maimonides, Onkelos (author of
a second-century Aramaic translation of the Bible) literally translated the
verse “I myself [i.e., God] will go down with you to Egypt and I myself will
also bring you back” (Gen. 46:4), despite the fact that he tended to remove
all traces of God’s corporeality. Maimonides’s reason for this, according to
Nahmanides, is once again that the narrative is part of a dream sequence
wherein “God called to Israel in a vision of night” (Gen. 46:2). Nahmanides
disagrees and looks to explain the verse using traditional sources:
Th e reason Onkelos here literally translated I myself will go down with you
to Egypt [and did not paraphrase it as “My Glory will go down with you”]
is that he wanted to allude to that which the rabbis have said: “When they
were exiled to Egypt, the Divine Presence went with them, as it is said,
I myself will go down with you to Egypt. When they were exiled to Elam,
the Divine Presence went down with them, as it is said, And I will set my
throne in Elam.” 28Rather than explain the verse, as Maimonides does, by appeals to vision,
Nahmanides here argues that the rabbinic confl ation of the divine presence
and God is more appropriate. Staying with Nahmanides’s quarrel with Mai-
monides over Onkelos’s hermeneutic for just a little longer, Nahmanides
then asks why Onkelos paraphrased the divine corporeality found in the
narrative of Jacob’s ladder (“I am with you”; Gen. 28:15), which also oc-