Homonymspart i · the two languages of scripture

The first object of this work is to explain certain words occurring in the prophetic books. Of these some are homonyms, and of their several meanings the ignorant choose the wrong ones. Guide, Introduction

The Guide begins with a lexicon. The first forty-nine chapters work through scriptural words that, taken literally, would make God a body: image, likeness, foot, hand, face, mouth, eye, ear, sit, stand, dwell, see, draw near, descend, ascend. Maimonides argues that each is an equivocal term — a single word with two unrelated meanings, one bodily and one not, and that scripture uses the second when speaking of God.

This is not allegory. The literal reader, on Maimonides' view, is not wrong because the text is figurative; he is wrong because he has chosen the wrong sense of a homonym. Foot means a part of an animal's body, and also a place, an end, a position. The footstool of My feet (Isa. 66:1) uses the second sense, just as the foot of the mountain uses it in plain speech. The reader who insists that God has feet has made an error of vocabulary, not of literary tact.

Why the language at all?

The obvious question. If God is incorporeal, why does Torah speak as though He has limbs? The Sages had an answer that Maimonides adopts and sharpens:

The Torah speaks in the language of men. Berakhot 31b, quoted at Guide I:26

Most readers, in most ages, are not philosophers. They begin where their language begins: with bodies, places, voices, hands. To address them at all, scripture must use the words they have. The philosopher's task is not to scorn the surface but to read through it, recovering the homonym's second sense.

The example of image

In I:1 Maimonides takes the hardest case first. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen. 1:26). The literalist reads image as shape, and concludes that God has a shape. Maimonides argues: tselem in Hebrew is the homonym par excellence. It can mean the bodily form of an idol (an inert object copying a shape), or the essential form by which a thing is what it is — that which makes a human human and not merely an animal of a certain anatomy.

The latter is intellect. Therefore man in the image of God is the claim that the intellect, the rational faculty, is what links man to the divine. Not the upright posture, not the symmetry of limbs. The homonym was the door; the door opened onto philosophy.

What follows

The forty-nine chapters of the lexicon are not throat-clearing. They are the discipline that makes the rest of the Guide possible. Once the reader has been trained to ask, of each scriptural term, which sense? — the literal-bodily or the philosophical — the apparent contradictions between Aristotle's incorporeal God and the Torah's seemingly anthropomorphic God begin to dissolve. They were never contradictions. They were misreadings.

One reads the Guide twice, then. Once to acquire the lexicon; once, with the lexicon in hand, to encounter the arguments. The perplexity Maimonides addresses is the perplexity of a careful reader who has the same word in both his Torah and his Aristotle, and cannot yet hear that they mean different things.

What the thread connects to

The lexicon's payoff is the via negativa: once you cannot say God has a hand, you cannot say God has anything in the ordinary predicative sense. That thread is Via Negativa. The corresponding argument about one — that even number is a homonym when applied to God — is in The Unity That Is Not Number.