Guide for the Perlexed (Moreh Nevukhim)
Is the Divine Origin of the Torah Really Incompatible with Maimonides’ Philosophical Principles?
Some contemporary scholars have argued that Maimonides only meant to claim for the masses that God revealed to Moses the Torah as we have it today, that he himself could not have accepted the Divine authorship of Torah since it is incompatible with his philosophical principles. Yet, a correct understanding of Maimonides yields no such incompatibility, and, indeed, there is to no reason not to take him at his word.
Published: February 5, 2019
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
This piece is a much abridged and somewhat less technical version of my essay, “Maimonides on the Divine Authorship of the Law,” in Interpreting Maimonides, ed. Charles H. Manekin and Daniel Davies (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019), 133–151. For reasons of space I keep references to a minimum here; the reader is directed to that volume for more details.
Moses Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah, Introduction to Chapter Ḥeleq (Eighth Principle). The translation is my own, based on Isaac Shailat’s edition in הקדמות הרמב”ם למשנה [Maimonides’ Introductions to the Mishnah] (Maaleh Adumim: Sheilat, 5756), 144 (Heb.), 372–373 (Ar.). Italicized words are in Hebrew in the original.
Cf. Mishneh Torah, Teshuvah 3:5; Letter to Yemen, and Guide of the Perplexed 3:50.
See Alvin Reines, “Maimonides’ Concept of Mosaic Prophecy,” Hebrew Union College Annual, 40/41 (1969–1970), 325–361, esp. 348; Kalmin Bland, “Moses and the Law According to Maimonides,” in Mystics, Philosophers and Politicians: Essays in Jewish Intellectual History in Honor of Alexander Altmann, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Daniel Swetschinski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982), 49–66 (63); Lawrence J. Kaplan, “I Sleep but My Heart Waketh: Maimonides’ Conception of Human Perfection,” in The Thought of Moses Maimonides: Philosophical and Legal Studies, ed. Ira Robinson, Lawrence J. Kaplan, and Julian Bauer (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1990), 130–166, esp. 139; Alfred L. Ivry, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed: A Philosophical Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 232; Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 2001), 261. For popular presentations of this interpretation of Maimonides, see Benjamin Sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 99–147; Micah Goodman, Maimonides and the Book That Changed Judaism: Secrets of the Guide for the Perplexed, trans. Yedidyah Sinclair (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2015), 98–102; trans. of, סודותיו של מורה הנבוכים (Or Yehudah: Kinneret/Zmora-Bitan/Dvir, 2010). For versions of this interpretation of Maimonides on this site, see Samuel Fleischacker, “Making Sense of the Revelation at Sinai: Revisiting Maimonides’ Eighth Principle of Faith,” TheTorah.com(2014); Howard Kreisel, “Were Maimonides and Some of His Followers Orthoprax?”TheTorah.com (2017).
References to Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed in this piece will be to part and chapter, followed by the page number in: Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
I say, “almost none” because Maimonides interprets the first two of the Ten Commandments, the existence of God, and His being one, to be eternal truths that can be rationally demonstrated; the others he claims to be of the class of generally accepted opinions and those accepted by virtue of traditional authority. Guide 2:33, p. 364.
These are terms that are associated with practical, not theoretical, intellect. See Howard Kreisel’s chapter on the practical intellect in his Maimonides’ Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Law, and the Human Ideal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 63–92 (75).
See especially Kaplan, “I Sleep but My Heart Waketh.”
See Shailat, Maimonides’ Introductions to the Mishnah, 371–372 (Arabic), 142–143 (Hebrew), my English translation.
There is evidence that Maimonides adopted the position that Moses heard a created voice and wrote it down; he mentions that the “general consensus of the community” is that the Torah was created, which is “meant to signify that His speech that is ascribed to Him is created,” and in his letter to R. Hasdai ha-Levi, he argues on the basis of the verse “And [Moses] heard the voice of the Lord speaking to him” (Num. 7:89) that Moses heard the created voice in the Tent of Meeting between the cherubim rather than receive a purely intellectual emanation. Letter to Hasdai ha-Levy in Isaac Shailat, ed., אגרות הרמב”ם [The Letters and Essays of Moses Maimonides], 3rd ed., (Maaleh Adumim: Shailat, 5755) 2:673–684. Cf.Guide 1:21 and 1:37, 86. (Shailat challenges the authenticity of this letter.)
Moreover, from the fact that the law was apprehended by Moses, and that this is the law “as found in our hands today,” it does not follow that had others been in the vicinity of Moses they would have been able to understand the Law, created sounds or not. In Guide 2:33 Maimonides sharply distinguishes between Moses’ understanding of the commandments at Sinai and those of the people. If Moses’s role is that of a scribe, it is a role that he and only he fulfills.
See Sommer, Revelation and Authority; as well as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted Through the Generations, ed. and trans. Gordon Tucker with Leonard Levin (New York: Continuum, 2006); trans. from תורה מן השמים באספקלריה של הדורות (NY: JTS, 1962).
