Winter 2017 Volume 43 Issue 2 199 Hilail Gildin On Rousseau’s Confession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar 215 Daniel P. Maher Simon Stevin’s Vita Politica: Pre-provisional Morality? 233 Rafael Major Poetry and Reason: A Midsummer Night’s Dream 255 Ying Zhang Biblical Exegesis as a Way of Philosophizing: The Beginning and the End of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed An Exchange: 279 Lee Ward The Challenge of Modernizing Seventeenth-Century English Political Texts: A Response to Foster 287 David Foster A Reply to Lee Ward Review Essay: 289 Robert Goldberg Homer on the Gods and Human Virtue: Creating the Foundations of Classical Civilization by Peter J. Ahrensdorf Book Reviews: 319 Stephen A. Block Principle and Prudence in Western Political Thought, edited by Christopher Lynch and Jonathan Marks 333 Eric Buzzetti The Socratic Turn: Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science by Dustin Sebell 341 Bernard J. Dobski The Philosopher’s English King: Shakespeare’s Henriad as Political Philosophy by Leon Harold Craig 347 Joshua D. King Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster by Hugo Slim 353 Peter McNamara The Foundations of Natural Morality: On the Compatibility of Natural Rights and the Natural Law by S. Adam Seagrave 357 Deborah O’Malley Beyond Radical Secularism: How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge by Pierre Manent; translated by Ralph C. Hancock 363 Lorraine Pangle Xenophon the Socratic Prince: The Argument of the Anabasis of Cyrus by Eric Buzzetti 369 Nathan Pinkoski Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet by Leon Harold Craig 375 Manu Samnotra Arendt’s Judgment: Freedom, Responsibility, Citizenship by Jonathan Peter Schwartz ©2017 Interpretation, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. ISSN 0020-9635 Editor-in-Chief Timothy W. Burns, Baylor University General Editors Charles E. Butterworth • Timothy W. Burns General Editors (Late) Howard B. White (d. 1974) • Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Seth G. Benardete (d. 2001) • Leonard Grey (d. 2009) • Hilail Gildin (d. 2015) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell • David Lowenthal • Harvey C. Mansfield • Thomas L. Pangle • Ellis Sandoz • Kenneth W. Thompson Consulting Editors (Late) Leo Strauss (d. 1973) • Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) • Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) • John Hallowell (d. 1992) • Ernest L. Fortin (d. 2002) • Muhsin Mahdi (d. 2007) • Joseph Cropsey (d. 2012) • Harry V. Jaffa (d. 2015) International Editors Terence E. Marshall • Heinrich Meier Editors Peter Ahrensdorf • Wayne Ambler • Marco Andreacchio • Maurice Auerbach • Robert Bartlett • Fred Baumann • Eric Buzzetti • Susan Collins • Patrick Coby • Erik Dempsey • Elizabeth C’de Baca Eastman • Edward J. Erler • Maureen Feder-Marcus • Robert Goldberg • L. Joseph Hebert • Pamela K. Jensen • Hannes Kerber • Mark J. Lutz • Daniel Ian Mark • Ken Masugi • Carol L. McNamara • Will Morrisey • Amy Nendza • Charles T. Rubin • Leslie G. Rubin • Thomas Schneider • Susan Meld Shell • Geoffrey T. Sigalet • Nicholas Starr • Devin Stauffer • Bradford P. Wilson • Cameron Wybrow • Martin D. Yaffe • Catherine H. Zuckert • Michael P. Zuckert Copy Editor Les Harris Designer Sarah Teutschel Inquiries Interpretation, A Journal of Political Philosophy Department of Political Science Baylor University 1 Bear Place, 97276 Waco, TX 76798 email [email protected] Biblical Exegesis as a Way of Philosophizing 255 Biblical Exegesis as a Way of Philosophizing: The Beginning and the End of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed* Ying Zhang Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China [email protected] I The Bible is, as Arthur Hyman states, “central to Maimonides’ thought.”1 This is especially true of his Guide of the Perplexed. Though widely treated as a philosophic book, the purpose of the Guide, as the author himself states, is to explain certain biblical “terms” and “very obscure parables in the books of the prophets.”2 It is therefore not strange that the Guide begins and ends with a series of lexicographic renderings of what Maimonides presents as the key terms in the Bible. The first two words Maimonides treats in the Guide are ṣelem (image) and demuth (likeness) in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Guide I 1, 21). According to Maimonides, the term ṣelem in this verse does not mean “the shape and configuration of a thing,” as is usually * Earlier versions of this article received valuable comments and suggestions from Professors Ralph Lerner and Mayer I. Gruber. The author would like to thank them for their great support and help. The research project that led to this essay was supported by Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Projects Fund. 1 Arthur Hyman, “Maimonides as Biblical Exegete,” in Maimonides and His Heritage, ed. Idit Dobbs- Weinstein, Lenn E. Goodman, and James A. Grady (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 2. 2 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, ed. and trans. Shlomo Pines, with introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 5–6. It needs to be noted that in the texts of the Guide of the Perplexed, the italicized words are those originally in Hebrew. © 2017 Interpretation, Inc. 256 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 43 / Issue 2 held. Rather, it should be rendered as “natural form,” that is, “the notion in virtue of which a thing is constituted as a substance and becomes what it is” (Guide I 1, 21–22, bold emphasis added). Likewise, Maimonides states that demuth here should be treated as “likeness in respect of a notion,” rather than the visible appearance. He further cites other biblical verses to sup- port his rendering of the words, and concludes that “it was…because of the divine intellect conjoined with man, that it is said of the latter that he is in the image of God and His likeness, not that God, may He be exalted, is a body and possesses a shape” (Guide I 1, 23; bold emphasis added). In other words, according to Maimonides, the image and the likeness that man shares with God is no other than intellect, the highest natural endowment of a human being, which separates man from all other earthly living beings. With this interpretation of the ṣelem of God, Maimonides begins his journey in the Guide. For students of philosophy, it may not be too hard to recognize Aristotelian concepts in this interpretation. For most Jews in the twelfth century, however, this rendering would seem quite odd, because it introduces certain pagan or alien elements, totally unfamiliar to the Jewish rabbinic tradition, into biblical interpretation. What then is the concern or purpose behind such a rendering? One thing is clear: what Maimonides offers is a kind of allegorical or figurative interpretation of the Bible. According to him, the true or intended meaning of the Bible’s equivocal terms and parables lies not in their external or literal, but rather in their internal or figurative, levels (Guide I Introduction, 5–12). In the very first chapter of the Guide, Maimonides emphasizes that the “image” by which man partakes in the deity is intellect; on the other hand, he also attempts to correct the mistaken opinion that God is corporeal. As Leo Strauss points out, “the first subject of the Guide is God’s incorporeality.”3 For Maimonides, the incorporeality of God is one of the three most important foundational teachings of the Torah, next to the existence and the unity of God. He thus states in his great Code, Mishneh Torah, “It is clearly set forth in the Torah and in the prophet that the Holy One (Blessed be He) is not a corporeal body, as it is said: For the Lord your God, He is the God in heaven above and upon earth beneath [a conflation of Josh. 2:11 and Deut. 4:39]. And a body cannot be in two places [simultaneously]” (“Laws concerning 3 Leo Strauss, “Introduction to Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed,” in Leo Strauss on Mai- monides: The Complete Writings, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 448. Biblical Exegesis as a Way of Philosophizing 257 the Foundations of the Law,” 1.5).4 Now this principle of the incorporeality of God appears, at first glance, to contradict many biblical terms, such as “His feet” (Exod. 24:10), “the finger of God” (Exod. 31:18), “the hand of the Lord” (Exod. 9:3), and so on. According to Maimonides, these figurative expres- sions were not more than “substitutes for the divine Name,” whose function was to help “the sons of man who cannot acknowledge anything other than bodies” in understanding the true teaching concerning God (“Laws concern- ing the Foundations of the Law,” 1.6).5 The establishment of the principle of the incorporeality of God is, for Maimonides, a necessary step towards eradi- cating the impulsion toward idolatry from the human heart, because idolatry always takes the form of the worship of images. On the other hand, as Leo Strauss incisively notices, “the belief in cor- poreality is one of the major reasons for the conflict between the Bible and philosophy.”6 Now the tension between the teaching of the Torah and that of philosophy is the biggest problem that perplexes Maimonides’s student Rabbi Joseph ben Judah—who is also the addressee of the Guide—and his like (Guide, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 3–4). It is thus not strange that Maimonides devotes his second chapter to the interpretation of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Maimonides’s interpretation of the Garden of Eden story begins with an objection that “a learned man” raised with him.