Turning Hills into Plains and Mountains into Valleys: On Translating Maimonides’s Guide

Moses Maimonides opened his great code of law Mishneh Torah with the words “All of the commandments given to Moses at Sinai were given together with their interpretations.” One could say of his philosophical classic, The Guide of the Perplexed, that it was given with its translations.

Written in Arabic around 1191, the Guide was quickly rendered into Hebrew by Samuel Ibn Tibbon and Judah al-Harizi in rival translations for the curious Jewish scholars of Provence in southern France. Later, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Meister Eckhart all read and were influenced by one or morethirteenth-century Latin translations, and early modern readers read it in Spanish, Italian, and the Latin retranslation of Johannes Buxtorf II. Salomon Munk’s nineteenth-century critical edition and French translation, Le guide des égarés, led the modern era of translations. In English, Michael Friedländer’s functional 1904 English version was the only complete translation until the landmark 1963 work of the Hebrew University scholar Shlomo Pines.

Pines worked on the translation for almost a decade, in close consultation with the University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss, and he was clearly guided by Strauss’s view of Maimonides as a fundamentally esoteric thinker. Such thinkers, Strauss had written in his influential essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” have “a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground, and a philosophic teaching, the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines.” Or, as he put it more bluntly in the essay that prefaced Pines’s translation, “The Guide has a public teaching and a secret teaching.” This made it necessary for the philosophical reader to read Maimonides’s text closely, paying special attention to technical terms, apparent contradictions, ambiguities, and obscurities, since, Strauss argued, it was precisely in or around such difficult passages that the secret, potentially subversive, teachings can be found.

Pines’s own “Translator’s Introduction” to the Guide emphasized that his translation was intended to “remain as close as is practicable to the original,” and to render “every Arabic technical term . . . by one and the same English term,” while preserving any “ambiguity or obscurity” present in the text. In doing so, he aimed to make it possible not only to read an English text that was as close as possible to the Arabic original, but to read between its lines. As a result, Pines was careful to render Maimonides’s largely Aristotelian language with the precise English terms that British and American philosophers had adapted for Aristotelian logic and science.

Both Pines and Strauss had exemplary European educations, spoke German as their first language and were conversant in many others—Warren Zev Harvey has written of Pines’s “uncanny fluency in dozens of ancient and modern languages”—but neither had completely unstilted English prose. In 1960, they asked Ralph Lerner, a graduate student of Strauss’s, to edit the work, which he did over an intense three-year period, in correspondence with both of them. In the end, Lerner (who is still at Chicago) recently told me, Pines felt that too many references had been moved from the footnotes to Maimonides’s text to his introduction, and Strauss felt that the translation was still not literal enough. To these issues, we may add that the translation never entirely lost its Teutonic flavor. Nonetheless, it was quickly and widely accepted as the standard English translation.

Lenn Goodman is a distinguished interpreter of Maimonides as well as a translator of medieval Arabic texts, including the twelfth-century philosophical allegory Hayy ibn Yaqzan. His Vanderbilt University colleague Phillip Lieberman is a historian who has spent much of his career working on the materials preserved in the Cairo Genizah to reconstruct the medieval Judeo-Arabic world from which The Guide of the Perplexed emerged. They are both Americans, and they have translated Maimonides’s text into fluent American prose.
 Moreover, they also have a different view of the literary style of the Guide, which they repeatedly describe as “informal.” The result is a smooth, easy-to-read, though somewhat paraphrastic translation into American English. Compare, for instance, their version of a brief programmatic remark Maimonides makes in his Introduction to the First Part of the Guide to that of Pines:

Any beginner who is no thinker at all can profit, I’m sure, from some chapters in this work. An accomplished student of the Torah who is perplexed in the way that I’ve described will profit from every chapter and should be all the more thrilled and delighted to hear them. [Goodman and Lieberman]

I know that, among men generally, every beginner will derive benefit from some of the chapters of this Treatise, though he lacks even an inkling in what is involved in speculation. A perfect man, on the other hand, devoted to the Law, and, as I have mentioned, perplexed, will benefit from all its chapters. [Pines]

This remark comes after Maimonides’s famous explication of the nature of parables in which the external meaning “holds . . . much that is wholesome socially. . . . But the inner sense [imparts] truths about Reality.” This, he says, is the meaning of the phrase “Golden apples chased with silver is a word well spoken” (Proverbs 25:11). And the remark comes just before Maimonides’s equally famous enumeration of the seven ways in which a book may contradict itself, the seventh of which, in Goodman and Lieberman’s translation, is:

Sometimes, with the deepest subjects, certain ideas may have to be suppressed and others revealed. A certain premise may be needed for the sake of the argument in one context; its contradictory, in another. The ordinary reader should not sense the discrepancy at all, and an author might use all sorts of devices to conceal it.

As passages such as this show, every translator of the Guide understands that it is in some sense an esoteric work. The only question is: what kind? What, exactly, is Maimonidean esotericism? Strauss and Pines understood the golden apples of philosophy to undermine the socially wholesome tenets of Judaism once one had seen through the latticework of silver. For instance, toward the end of his life, Pines argued that although Maimonides’s official position was that the ultimate human goal was intellectual perfection in the contemplation of eternal truths and that such knowledge resulted in immortality for the souls that attained it, in esoteric fact, Maimonides was less certain and may have doubted the possibility of such knowledge, and hence even a purely intellectual afterlife altogether.

Goodman argues for a less confrontational version of Maimonides’s esotericism. In his introduction, as well as in his companion volume A Guide to The Guide to the Perplexed, Goodman repeatedly takes aim at Pines and Strauss, arguing, as many have before him, that while Maimonides certainly hides his meaning from the casual reader and that while the secrets of the Guide may both deepen and qualify conventional belief, Strauss and Pines were wrong to think that they undermined it.

This interpretive stance has repercussions for Goodman and Lieberman’s translation. “The present translation,” Lieberman writes in his introduction, “acknowledges the esoteric nature of the Guide” but eschews Pines’s policy of using the same English equivalent for key words and Aristotelian technical terms regardless of context, which would only succeed in “alienating the reader from the text.” Thus, he rejects Pines’s approach as one that leaves the reader with “logical difficulties” and “contradictions in the text itself.” Of course, Pines thought such difficulties and contradictions were an inextricable part of the Guide.

In a letter addressed to Joseph ben Judah placed at the opening of the Guide, Maimonides described how Joseph had come to study with him and how he had guided him. At the same time, he also reminded his student that he had occasionally had to rein him in, “urging you to take one step at a time.” He went on:

As long as you were here, whenever some verse came up, or some passage from the Sages that hinted at an out-of-the-way idea, I explained it to you freely. But when God decreed our parting and you moved on, memories of our sessions revived an old plan of mine: Your absence spurred me to set down this work, written for you and others like you, no matter how few. I’ve laid it out in separate chapters, all of which will reach you as I write them.

This may suggest that the Guide is epistolary, a book of letters, but the clear distinction between the opening letter and the rest of the work, along with the fact that Maimonides never mentions Joseph ben Judah again, may also suggest the opposite: that the opening letter is an epistle, but the rest is not. However, Goodman and Lieberman take the view that the chapters are letters as a key to the Guide’s supposed “informality.” In a footnote to this passage, they take the position that the Guide’s dissemination as letters means that it “does not display its thematic structure on its face,” even if it “is well planned.”

That is, they do not take the opening letter as an implicit outline of the work’s contents, as almost all other readers of the Guide do. In the letter, Maimonides recounts identifying Joseph’s desire for theoretical things from his poetry and prose writings, and then having studied (or, perhaps reviewed) mathematics, astronomy, and some logic, before turning to Maimonides for the “mysteries of Scripture” and then “theology,” or metaphysics. This is usually understood to mean that the Guide begins with some logic, namely the interpretation of Hebrew terms and syllogistic reasoning about parables (Part I), before turning to prophetic works and their interpretation (Part II) and then metaphysics (the beginning of Part III).

The Account of the Beginning, or the creation of the universe, which Maimonides identifies with Aristotle’s physics, and the Account of the Chariot, which Maimonides identifies with Aristotle’s metaphysics, are themselves mysteries of the scripture (Gen. 1–2 and Ezek. 1–10 respectively). Thus, their exposition, which makes up the greater part of Parts II and III of the Guide, fits in well with the program.

Scholars have long noted that this order of study is parallel to the order of study of the Aristotelian sciences promulgated by Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi in the tenth century (whom a student of mine once referred to as “the Alpha Rabbi”). Al-Farabi’s curriculum begins with cultivating desire for knowledge and then proceeds to logic, mathematics, astronomy, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. This order of study is not entirely identical with the general plan of the Guide, but it is close enough to suggest that Maimonides intended to set up a Jewish alternative to al-Farabi’s order of study.

Indeed, it sets up precisely the kind of tension one encounters when trying to reconcile Aristotelian science with Jewish thought—a tension most scholars see at the very heart of Maimonides’s Guide. But here and throughout, Goodman and Lieberman tend to minimize the systematic character of Maimonides’s Aristotelianism, seeing no “thematic structure” outlined in the opening of the work. What is more, they have a footnote identifying Maimonides’s appeal to the importance of ordered study with Plato’s Symposium 210e, in which the Prophetess Diotima famously explains the ladder of love. There is no indication that Maimonides read the Symposium, nor was it completely translated into Arabic in the Middle Ages. Rather, this is one of dozens of notes and comments—to Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Proclus, and others—that repeatedly place Maimonides in a Platonist frame of reference, without (quite) arguing that their ideas had direct influence on Maimonides.

The different threads of their argument suggest that Goodman and Lieberman see the Guide as having been written without thematic structure but with a design to spur the reader to climb a kind of Platonic ladder, moving through its chapters, progressing from the desire to know to a detached love of the ever-existent God. Such an approach, which Goodman calls “Maimonides’ ladder of human aspiration,” does not really differentiate between the sciences, as al-Farabi and Maimonides did, but sees them all as a unified, somewhat amorphous body of knowledge.

For Pines, in contrast, The Guide emerges as a difficult, perhaps impossibly difficult, attempt to reconcile the system of Aristotelian logic and science with Jewish thought and law through the precise use of scientific language. The perplexity of the Guide lies in the ambiguities one encounters when one attempts such a reconciliation, many of which are only noticeable through closely reading the text and paying careful attention to any contradictions found in it.

For Goodman and Lieberman, however, the perplexity of the Guide ultimately leads to what Goodman in his companion volume calls “the deep harmony of biblical and rational truths.” This harmony, it turns out, lies in the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation, which Goodman says is “the key to all the riddles” of the Guide, and a modernized version of which he urges on the contemporary reader perplexed by neo-Darwinian biology and modern physics in his conclusion. The Neoplatonic idea of emanation is notoriously hard to describe, but at a first cut one might say that it posits that ideas, or forms, emerge from a unitary divine entity, and thereby create and give order to the universe. Goodman speaks of emanation as “the gift of the forms that exercise sway over matter . . . a path from physics in its broad sense to cosmology and on to metaphysics.”

In his introduction to the translation, Goodman defines emanation as “the projection of an idea, giving pattern and thus form or essence to otherwise unformed matter,” which is fine as far as it goes. If the goal of the Guide is to reach primary ideas or forms, an exact word-for-word translation is not necessary or even desirable. According to this view, a reader should look beyond the Guide and toward the divine source of emanation, which is behind and beyond its text. This is not to say that Maimonides denies emanation. Indeed, as the Maimonidean scholar Herbert Davidson once said of al-Farabi, his universe was “fashioned of Aristotelian bricks and of mortar borrowed from Neoplatonic philosophy.” Still, emanation is but one piece of a larger puzzle.

There is a certain irony here: In seeking to escape Straussian esotericism, Goodman and Lieberman dive into Neoplatonic esotericism. What, moreover, could be more esoteric than Goodman’s obscure definitions of emanation?  In rejecting the word-for-word method employed by Pines on the grounds that it produces “logical difficulties,” Goodman and Lieberman overlook the logical structure of the Guide and impose on it a rather un-Maimonidean harmony, which is somehow supposed to be underwritten by the idea of emanation.

Whatever logical difficulties are papered over by Goodman and Lieberman’s smooth non-
 literal translation, key Aristotelian logical concepts are sometimes left unrecognizable. For instance, Aristotle introduced his Ten Categories as a comprehensive list of how we describe and categorize things. So, for example, if we say, “Socrates is a man,” we are employing the general category of substance (man or humanity being a type of substance) to describe a particular subject (Socrates). But what does it mean, in these terms, to say God “is merciful,” or “is in heaven” or “is king,” as the Bible and rabbis so often do? Maimonides’s turn to Aristotelian categories is an attempt to be logically precise about the most important of all subjects—God—in such a way that one can avoid saying that God has a body.

In a key chapter in the first part of the Guide, Maimonides tells us that the Aristotelian category of action (an yaf‘ala, in Arabic) is the only category that can be applied by human speakers to God. This encourages readers to interpret scriptural and liturgical statements like “God is merciful” and “God is king” as referring to God’s actions or to His setting everything else in action in a kingly and merciful manner. This point, so central to Maimonides’s understanding of how to speak of God, is completely lost in Goodman and Lieberman’s translation. They render the opening line of the chapter as follows:

All the names for God found in Scripture derive from verbs.

Technically, the Arabic af‘āl  can, in grammatical contexts, refer to “verbs” (like its Hebrew cognate, pe’alim), but after Maimonides’s extensive and detailed description of the categories and this emphasis on the applicability of the category of action to God, it is clear that what comes here should be read “actions,” not “verbs,” as, in fact, Pines translates it:

All the names of God, may He be exalted, that are to be found in any of the books derive from actions.

Here and elsewhere, there are philosophical costs to Goodman and Lieberman’s linguistic imprecision.

As it happens, the contrast between Goodman and Lieberman’s loose and loosely Platonist translation of the Guide and Pines’s extremely literal, largely word-for-word Aristotelian text has a historical precedent.

When Samuel Ibn Tibbon was commissioned by the curious intellectuals of Provence to translate the Guide into Hebrew, he produced an extraordinarily literal and, as a result, quite stilted translation. For every Arabic term, including prepositions, he strove to use a single Hebrew term—and then he kept them in the same order. In doing so, he created a Hebrew as capable of expressing complex Aristotelian concepts as Arabic. But this Arabicized philosophical Hebrew irritated not only his Provençal readers but even Maimonides himself. In a 1199 CE letter to Ibn Tibbon, Maimonides wrote:

One who translates from language to language ought first to understand the meaning and then to express it as he understands it in the [target] language. He cannot do this unless he moves some text forward and others back, and expresses one word using many words and many words using one word, and leaves out some prepositions, and adds others so that the meaning will be ordered and understood in the target language. (my translation)

The sages of Provence had evidently reached a similar conclusion and turned immediately to the well-known translator, poet, and man of letters, Judah al-Harizi, to retranslate the Guide from Arabic to Hebrew. In his introduction to the new translation, al-Harizi notes that he had been commissioned to render Maimonides’s work in “simple, elegant words that are pleasant to those who understand them.” His translation was intended to “direct through flat-ground men who err, turning hill into plain and mountain into valley.”

The hilly and mountainous, error-prone paths were apparently those laid by Ibn Tibbon, who,  though he was, al-Harizi admitted, “wise and intelligent,” still produced a translation whose “meanings were not apparent and whose secrets were hidden away and sealed.” To explain those meanings and secrets, al-Harizi wrote an explanation of terms in the Guide and a chapter-by-chapter account of the work. But both the translation and his explanations tended to obscure Maimonides’s rigorous Aristotelian argumentation and subtle ambiguities, while listing in a Platonist direction.

In 1213, Ibn Tibbon responded by retranslating the Guide, supplementing it with his own companion volume on the meanings of the difficult terms. In his introduction to the revised translation, he maligned al-Harizi as a mere “poet” and described his companion volumes to the Guide as “nonsense,” “provocations,” and “stumbling blocks.” Justifying his literal approach, Ibn Tibbon wrote, “I was not worthy in my eyes to switch the terms, out of fear that I suffer what happened to [al-Harizi] when he added, subtracted, and changed the text—he destroyed the whole thing entirely.” Part of what al-Harizi had destroyed, Ibn Tibbon argued, were the Aristotelian terms and formulations that Maimonides had subtly woven into his text and that demanded careful attention and, on occasion, reading between the lines. 

In his Explanation of Unusual Terms, Ibn Tibbon explains Aristotelian logic and the division of the sciences. This includes a relatively detailed account of Aristotle’s categories and an account of the order and structure of the sciences, noting Maimonides’s identification of Genesis 1 with Aristotelian physics and of Ezekiel 1 with Aristotelian metaphysics.

Al-Harizi’s Explanation of Every Unusual Term in the Guide does not address the ten Aristotelian categories, except for a Platonist mention of an enduring substance and a destructible accident. Nor did he seem to understand other matters of Aristotelian logic and science, beyond mentioning that Sefer Ha-Shema (Aristotle’s Physics), to which thirteenth-century Hebrew readers had no access, was “Aristotle’s book on the subjects of science.” He seems to have seen science in a vaguely Platonist way as unified rather than as a ramified system of disparate subjects as Aristotelians like al-Farabi and Maimonides did. In his discussion of the term “philosopher,” he defines it as “anyone who knows the divine science and nefesh.” The Hebrew term, nefesh, can mean soul, but al-Harizi here and elsewhere follows the uses of its Arabic cognate, nafs, to mean “self.” Philosophy as a unified study of the self and the divine is one of the cornerstones of Neoplatonic thought and includes interpretations of the Delphic maxim “Know thyself.”

Over the following centuries, those philosophical Hebrew readers who wished to know Maimonides, including most of the important Jewish philosophers of the later Middle Ages and modern period, made their way through Ibn Tibbon’s rough Aristotelian terrain rather than strolling al-Harizi’s Platonist plains. Eight hundred years later, English readers are now faced with a similar choice.

Near the very end of the Guide, Maimonides discusses punishments for what we might call crimes of theory. Maimonides includes this in his account of how punishments should fit the crimes for which they atone. Thus, in some cases the atonement for idolatrously worshipping goats is to sacrifice goats to God. More directly—and more relevant to Maimonides’s readers—the atonement for a moral indiscretion is to adopt an opposite moral trait.

As for sins of theory proper, Maimonides says that in such a case, a person should stop all thought (fikra) about the “things of this world” (umūr al-dunyā’) and focus only on the intelligible (al-ma‘aqūl)—that is, to engage in an act of pure thought, removed from the world and focused on eternal truth. This is how Shlomo Pines translates the full sentence, word for word from the Arabic:

If the act of disobedience consists in a speculation—I mean by this that if he believes in an opinion that is not sound because of his incapacity and his slackness in inquiry and in devoting himself to speculation—he must counter this by suppressing his reflection and preventing it from reflecting about anything pertaining to the things of this world, but direct it exclusively to the intelligible and to an exact study of what ought to be believed.

Goodman and Lieberman render the same sentence as follows:

If it was [an] intellectual [affront]—holding an unsound view from incapacity, laxity, or aversion to inquiry—one must counter by curbing his musings, checking all worldly distractions, and focusing on what is rational, with careful study of the beliefs one ought to hold.

Aside from the use of “intellectual” for the Arabic (nazhariyya), which is normally translated “theoretical” or “speculative,” and the translation of al-ma‘aqūl as “rational” rather than “intellectual,” Goodman and Lieberman leave out most of the details about how the poor sinner in theory came to be in his situation. Most significantly, and surprisingly, the prescribed turn to the “intelligible” and to the “study of what ought to be believed” actually fits a Platonist reading of Maimonides: One must turn away from the world and toward the eternal forms. Goodman and Lieberman’s talk of setting aside “distractions” and focusing on “the rational” sounds more like Bertrand Russell than Maimonides. Reading the almost breezy English of Goodman and Lieberman’s translation can feel to the reader like a breath of fresh air. But too often one is not quite sure that one is breathing the same air as that of Maimonides and his great interpreters. Despite its Teutonic ponderousness and copious literalism, I would still recommend Shlomo Pines’s translation to students, teachers, and interested readers. It usually does a good job with the technical Aristotelian language, and its very copiousness allows for varying readings, even Neoplatonic ones.