ABSTRACT
Maimonides’s The Guide of the Perplexed is primarily concerned with a philosophical and theological understanding of God as revealed through Scripture and in the light of human reason. Maimonides’s discusses the organization of the heavenly spheres, drawing on Aristotle’s notion of God as the “prime mover.” Maimonides then addresses the creation account in Genesis, and, by explaining its language and allegorical terms, he harmonizes the biblical narrative with philosophical thought by arguing that god is the creator of the heavenly spheres and that from him they derived their motion. Since The Guide was written for the educated Jewish reader, Maimonides devotes a significant portion of his work to biblical language that suggests God’s physical nature. Linguistic accuracy was critical for Maimonides, who argued that “belief is not the notion that is uttered, but the notion that is represented in the soul when it has been averred of it that it is in fact just as it has been represented”.
