ABSTRACT
For the Biblical writers as well as the rabbis, this conviction was a central feature of their faith. However, in the Middle Ages, Jewish thinkers wrestled with the philosophical perplexities connected with this notion. Pre-eminent among their concerns was the question whether God can do absolutely everything. According to the tenth century Jewish philosopher Saadiah Gaon in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, the soul will not praise God for causing five to be more than ten without further addition, nor for being able to put the world through the hollow of a signet ring without making the world narrower and the ring wider, nor for bringing back the day which has passed in its original state. These, he argued, would be absurd acts. ‘Of course,’ he wrote, ‘certain heretics ask us about such matters, and we do indeed answer them that God is able to do everything. This thing, however, that they ask of him is not anything because it is absurd, and the absurd is nothing. It is therefore, as though they were to ask: “Is God capable of doing what is nothing?” ’ (The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, II, 13, p. 134).
