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Mishneh Torah: Foundations of the Torah

The opening section of a code of Jewish law, which begins with God's existence, the angels and the motion of the stars.

by Maimonides53 passages held

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Original title
Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah
Original language
Hebrew

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Overview

In 1232 the rabbis of northern France, urged on by two rabbis in southern France, Solomon of Montpellier and Jonah Gerondi, banned the study of the Guide for the Perplexed and of the Book of Knowledge. That book is the first of the fourteen in the Mishneh Torah, the code of Jewish law that Maimonides wrote in Hebrew and completed around 1180. This section opens it, and it begins with physics. Its first law says that the foundation of all foundations is to know that a First Being exists and brought everything else into being. The four chapters that follow describe a God with no body, the angels as minds without matter, the turning spheres of the heavens and the four elements beneath them. The rabbis of the Talmud had guarded two subjects as secrets, the Work of the Chariot and the Work of Creation, and told of four great sages who entered the pardes, the "orchard" of hidden knowledge; not all of them had the mind for it. Maimonides identifies those secrets with what his own four chapters have just taught about God and nature, and then rules that nobody should walk in that orchard before learning what is permitted and what is forbidden, because the law steadies the mind and is open to everyone, men and women, the learned and the simple. The later chapters are law of another kind. The fifth sets out when a Jew must die rather than break a commandment, a question Maimonides had lived with: when the Almohads, a Berber dynasty that offered its Jews conversion, exile or death, took Córdoba in 1148, his family left the city. The last chapters say how a true prophet is recognised, and why a miracle alone proves nothing.

Key concepts

What are the Work of the Chariot and the Work of Creation?

They are the two subjects the rabbis of the Talmud kept secret, named after Ezekiel's vision of God's chariot and the Bible's account of creation. Maimonides identifies them with philosophy: the Work of the Chariot is what his first chapters teach about God and the angels, the Work of Creation is physics, the spheres and the elements. Physics may be taught to anyone able to learn it, the higher subject only in outline, to a student who reasons for himself.

Why does God have no body, according to this book?

Because the heavens never stop turning, and only an infinite power could keep them turning forever. Every body is finite, and so is every power that resides in a body. So the One who moves the sphere is not a body, and cannot be divided or counted alongside anything else. From the same argument Maimonides draws God's oneness: several gods could differ only in the way bodies differ.

What are angels in this book?

Minds without matter. Maimonides calls them forms that need no body, ranked in ten degrees, and the ten names the Bible gives angels, such as the Holy Living Creatures or the Wheels, name those ranks. When a prophet sees an angel with wings or a human shape, he is seeing in a vision, in figures fitted to the human imagination, a being that has no shape at all.

What does sanctifying God's name mean?

It means acting so that God is honoured in the eyes of others, and its opposite, profaning the name, makes God despised. The highest case is dying rather than committing a sin the law says one must never commit. But the idea reaches everyday life: a learned person who speaks gently, receives people pleasantly and takes insults without returning them sanctifies the name, while the same person picking quarrels profanes it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Law Code That Begins With the Heavens

Why should the first laws a Jew learns be about God's existence, the angels and the motion of the stars? Maimonides makes knowing the world the first commandment, and the way to loving its maker.

The opening law commands knowing that a First Being exists and brought everything else into being. Four chapters of physics follow: a God with no body, ten ranks of angels that are minds without matter, the spheres and the four elements. Love and awe, Maimonides says, come from exactly this study: whoever sees the wisdom in creatures yearns to love their maker and trembles at his own smallness. The rabbis' secret subjects, he rules, are these same chapters, and no one should enter that orchard before being filled with the bread and meat of the law.

  • cosmology
  • intellect
  • angels
  • elements
  • incorporeality
  • divine simplicity
  • love of god
  • epistemology
  • divine names

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Die Rather Than Transgress

When someone is told to break the law or be killed, which choice honours God? Maimonides answers with careful limits, so that martyrdom is sometimes commanded and sometimes a sin.

The Torah's commandments are for living by, not dying for, so a Jew forced on pain of death to break almost any of them should break it and live. Three are excepted: idolatry, forbidden sexual relations and murder, for which one must die. The line moves with the circumstances, ten Jews present or a tyrant's decree against the religion make even a lesser command worth dying for. Dying when the law says to live is guilt, not holiness. A scholar can also profane God's name without any threat, by delaying payment of a debt he could settle.

  • martyrdom
  • sanctification
  • coercion
  • blasphemy
  • law
  • intention

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Testing a Prophet

If someone claims to speak for God and performs wonders, how is anyone to know whether to believe them? Maimonides denies that a miracle settles it, even for Moses.

Israel did not believe Moses because of his signs, Maimonides argues, since a sign may be produced by sorcery. They believed because the whole people stood at Sinai and heard for themselves. A later prophet is tested by predictions, and only by predictions of good: a promised calamity that does not come proves nothing, because God may relent, but a promised good that fails exposes a false prophet. No prophet, however many wonders he works, may change the Torah, whose commandments stand forever.

  • prophecy
  • religious authority
  • miracles
  • testimony
  • revelation
  • sacred texts

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Within this work

passages held
53
distinct concepts
106
by passages held, corpus-wide
#648

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “prophecy” and “religious authority”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 6 concepts, joined by 8 pairings. 43 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
prophecyreligious authority14
miraclesprophecy6
lawprophecy5
lawreligious authority5
miraclesreligious authority5
intellectprophecy3
cosmologyintellect2
lawmiracles1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Commentary on the Mishnah: Tractate Sanhedrin (Kitāb al-Sirāj: Sanhedrin)

    One tractate of Maimonides' first great book, the Commentary on the Mishnah, including the introduction to Perek Helek in which the Thirteen Principles first appear; held in the medieval Hebrew translation printed in the Vilna Talmud.

     HE
  2. Eight Chapters on Ethics (Shemonah Perakim)

    Maimonides' ethics set out in eight chapters, opening his commentary on the tractate Avot in 1168; the Mishneh Torah's laws of character later restate its doctrine of the mean as law. Held in Joseph Gorfinkle's English of 1912.

     EN
  3. Mishneh Torah: Foundations of the Torah (Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah) you are here EN
  4. Mishneh Torah: Human Dispositions (Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot De'ot)

    The second of the five sections of the Book of Knowledge, between the Foundations of the Torah and the laws of Torah study; held alone, its seven chapters in Simon Glazer's English of 1927.

     EN
  5. Mishneh Torah: Repentance (Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Teshuvah)

    Closing the Mishneh Torah's first book, the Book of Knowledge, Hilkhot Teshuvah is the last of its five sections; held alone, its ten chapters in Simon Glazer's English of 1927.

     EN
  6. The Commentary to Mishnah Aboth (Kitāb al-Sirāj: Avot)

    Maimonides' commentary on the five chapters of Avot, written within the Commentary on the Mishnah and opened by the Eight Chapters, which have their own page here; held in Samuel ibn Tibbon's medieval Hebrew.

     HE
  7. The Guide for the Perplexed (Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn)

    Maimonides' last major book, addressed to a single reader and completed in Fustat around 1190, a decade after the Mishneh Torah had made his name. Held here in Michael Friedländer's English of 1904, with the letter to Joseph.

     EN
  8. Treatise on Logic (Maqāla fī ṣināʿat al-manṭiq)

    Traditionally the earliest of Maimonides' writings; held in Moses ibn Tibbon's Hebrew, all fourteen chapters, from a Warsaw printing of 1928.

     HE
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