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The Guide for the Perplexed

Moses Maimonides · philosophical theology, c. 1190·21 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • The title names the reader, not the book. Maimonides writes for one specific man he already trained: R. Joseph Ibn Aknin, who studied logic, astronomy, and mathematics with him before growing "perplexed and bewildered." He says he wrote the book chapter by chapter and mailed each one to his former student as it was finished.
  • Chapter I redefines the image of God as a grammar problem. Maimonides splits the Hebrew word toar, physical shape, from tzelem, specific form: Joseph is called beautiful in toar, but man is made in God's tzelem, meaning intellect, not a body. He argues this on the opening pages specifically to stop readers picturing God with a face and limbs.
  • Adam's disobedience cost him intellect, not granted him morality. Answering a real question from "a learned man," Maimonides insists the standard reading has it backwards: Adam possessed perfect intellectual perception before eating the fruit, and the fall degraded that faculty down to mere apparent-truth reasoning about good and bad, meaning shame at nudity.
  • Prophecy is described as lightning, not a switch. Some men catch "frequent flashes" that make their night "as clear as the day," Maimonides writes, while others see the light only once in a lifetime, "as if it were the flame of the rotating sword." Moses alone stood in continuous light.
  • Job's friends aren't wrong about God, they're wrong about the adversary. In chapter twenty-two of Part Three, Maimonides argues Job is fiction, not history, since the sages cannot agree whether he lived under the Patriarchs, Moses, or David. He reads the story literally: property lost first, then children, then Job's own body, the exact order people actually fear losing things.
  • The book ends on one verse from Jeremiah, then the word Amen. Maimonides closes by ranking four kinds of human perfection, property, body, character, intellect, and lands on Jeremiah 9:23: glory only in understanding and knowing God through loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness. The last line reads, "He is found by every one who seeks Him, if he always goes toward Him, and never goes astray. Amen."
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the founding document of rationalist theology, a rabbi using Aristotle to argue every anthropomorphic verse in the Bible is a deliberate figure of speech, not a description.

A twelfth-century rabbi writes one student a chapter-by-chapter letter explaining how to stop panicking when the Bible and Aristotle seem to contradict each other.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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