Maimonides and the Thirteen Principles

Overview

Recall questions on Maimonides' life and works, the origin of the Thirteen Principles, each group of principles on G-d, revelation and reward, prophecy and Moses, the messiah and resurrection, negative theology, the Principles in worship, and reason and revelation.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Who was Maimonides, and what were his major works?

   Model answer

   Moses ben Maimon, known by the acronym Rambam, lived from 1138 to 1204. Born in Cordoba, he and his family fled the Almohad persecution, moved through North Africa and eventually settled at Fustat in Egypt, where he served as head of the Jewish community and worked as a physician to the vizier's household. He wrote a commentary on the Mishnah, a comprehensive fourteen-book code of Jewish law arranged by subject and written in clear Hebrew, a philosophical work addressed to religiously committed readers troubled by the conflict between philosophy and scripture, and a large body of letters and medical writing. No later Jewish thinker has been argued with more persistently.

2. 2

   Where do the Thirteen Principles come from, and why is a list of required beliefs unusual in Judaism?

   Model answer

   Maimonides set them out in his commentary on the Mishnah, in the introduction to the chapter dealing with who has a share in the world to come. They are unusual because Judaism had developed for well over a thousand years without a creed: it defined membership by birth or conversion and by observance of the commandments, not by subscription to articles of faith. Maimonides was writing in a world where Islamic and Christian theology both worked with formal doctrine, and he wanted to state what a Jew must hold in order for the tradition's promises to make sense. The attempt was influential and immediately contested.

3. 3

   Maimonides groups the first five principles together. What do they establish?

   Model answer

   They set out the conception of G-d. The first affirms that G-d exists and is the cause of everything else that exists. The second affirms that G-d is one, in an absolute rather than a merely numerical sense. The third affirms that G-d has no body and no physical likeness. The fourth affirms that G-d is eternal, without beginning or end. The fifth affirms that G-d alone is to be worshipped, with no intermediary. Taken together they describe a G-d who is utterly unlike anything in the created world.

4. 4

   What does the first principle claim about G-d's existence, and how is it rooted in biblical Judaism?

   Model answer

   It claims that a perfect being exists who brought everything else into being and on whom all other existence depends, so that G-d is not one item in the universe but its cause. Biblically, this rests on the opening of Genesis, where G-d creates rather than emerges, and on the name disclosed to Moses at the bush, which speaks of being itself. Maimonides developed it philosophically, arguing from the existence of motion and change to a necessary being who is not himself caused. In living Judaism the claim is affirmed at the start of the Yigdal hymn and is the least contested of the thirteen across all denominations, though Reconstructionist and some Progressive thinkers reinterpret G-d in non-personal terms.

5. 5

   What does Maimonides mean by the unity of G-d, and why does he insist it is not the same as being one in number?

   Model answer

   He means that G-d is absolutely simple: not made of parts, not a composite of substance and attributes, not one member of a class of which there could be others. Numerical oneness would still allow G-d to be counted alongside other things, and to be a unity made of components. Biblically the claim rests on the Shema, the declaration of divine oneness recited twice daily and written in the mezuzah and tefillin, and on the prophetic insistence that there is no other. Maimonides sharpened it into a philosophical doctrine of divine simplicity that also rules out the Christian Trinity and any dualism. It remains the belief for which Jewish martyrs traditionally died, and it is affirmed unchanged by Orthodox and Progressive Jews alike.

6. 6

   What does the fourth principle, the eternity of G-d, assert?

   Model answer

   That G-d is absolutely first and absolutely last, without beginning, without end and not subject to time in the way created things are. Biblically it rests on the language of the everlasting G-d and on passages contrasting a creation that wears out with a creator who does not. Maimonides distinguishes this from the eternity of the world: he argues that the world was created and is not eternal, while conceding that philosophical proof of creation from nothing is not available and that the doctrine is held because scripture teaches it. Living Judaism affirms divine eternity in the daily liturgy without controversy.

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