Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed is a text infinitely concerned with textual interpretation. Most of the first of the two volumes explores the meanings of Hebrew homonyms which refer to God; the second volume examines in detail the nature of prophets and prophecy. Maimonides uses the Guide as a foundation upon which to consider "the mysteries of the Torah … this great, noble, and sublime subject, which is a stake upon which everything hangs and a pillar upon which everything is supported"1  relative to divine providence and trial. Maimonides admits trial as "one of the greatest difficulties of the law"2  and examines consecutively two essential parables, the trial of Job and the Aqedah. I argue that Maimonides examines the Book of Job with specific intent toward its potential benefit for the perplexed, and that he discusses the Aqedah immediately afterward to magnify the role of spiritual trial within the community of believers.

Maimonides considers the dual esoteric and exoteric roles of a prophetic parable within a community of believers under the guise of instructing the perplexed how to interpret a text. I found myself most intrigued by the Book of Job, the only book of prophecy that Maimonides addresses in its entirety within the Guide. He examines especially the crucial last chapter of Job4  with meticulous care and attention toward what the perplexed may learn from its illustration of how a wise man regards trials given his final understanding of God’s providence.

In his affliction, Job demands that God justify his creation and administration of the world; conversely, the perplexed seeks to justify a bent for study of the natural world within the boundaries of faith. Reconciling the theological tension between a scientific interpretation of Creation and an orthodox understanding of the Creator proves a fertile ground for the treatment of trial and the providence of a God of faithfulness and without iniquity.5  But I argue that Maimonides’ considers Job’s affliction as an inherently public, as well as personal, trial of faith which cannot be examined on a merely theoretical basis, but must be considered on a political, exoteric basis as well. This is why Maimonides chooses to follow his interpretation of the Book of Job with another parable pivotal to Jewish thought: that of the Binding of Isaac, the Aqedah.6  He then supports and magnifies his interpretation by discussing the Aqedah with respect to the political purpose of trial in a religious community. Properly, to understand divine providence, it is necessary to demolish the notion of trial as a test of faith for a blameless individual who will thus accrue a greater reward. Trial, Maimonides posits, exists not to inform God of an individual’s faith, but rather to inform the community of believers what is expected of their faith.7  This is a fascinating conclusion for an assertively esoteric work: what is the perplexed to make of it?

Given the perilous ambiguity of the text of Job, how is the perplexed to gloss Maimonides’ interpretations and understand what natural wisdom will dictate that his faith have? I will begin by examining the nature of the perplexed, because Maimonides’ interpretation of the Book of Job is posited crucially on its study by the perplexed as being radically different than its study by believers with less intellectual potential. In his public writings, he ostensibly confined himself to mishneh Torah, the "repetition" of Torah.8  However, the Guide is different because it addresses one of Maimonides’ close students, a man whom he refers to as being perplexed. What is the nature of perplexity, though, and how does it differ from confusion? Maimonides goes to great and esoteric length to preserve this wisdom for its intended audience and to elude (protect?) those who lack divine intellectual overflow.9  The mysteries of the Torah are not public fodder: even Maimonides admits to deep reservations about having put these matters into writing. Yet at the same time, the perplexed seeks to supplement rather than supplant his faith with the understanding of inherently exoteric phenomena such as the nature of prophecy immediately alongside his esoteric studies of homonyms and Aristotelian cosmology.

But this state is in itself not enough: most of the community elders who wrote to Maimonides with their legal questions identified themselves as such, regardless of the absurdity of their questions.11  Additionally, the perplexed person has the ability and inclination to seriously seek intellectual perfection with spiritual perfection as its end, bearing witness to Maimonides’ own particular infusion of Aristotelian and Platonic rational excellences with his conception of an all-encompassing understanding and love of God. Maimonides’ perplexed must be capable of apprehending that while one’s material body is subject to worldliness, secular order and human providence, one’s soul’s capacity for abstraction can reveal the true nature of divine providence and God’s order. The additional element this learning has lent the perplexed is the active seeking to perfect one’s understanding of the Law while not abandoning the rational excellence which one has striven to achieve in all things. The perplexed is one who has within his own mind reached a point where he must either "renounce the foundations of the Law" or "turn his back on [his intellect] … perceiving that he has brought loss to himself and harm to his religion."12 

Desperately, patiently, meticulously, the perplexed is driven to reconcile his drive toward the intellectual perfection with his drive toward the spiritual perfection: something which Maimonides considers entirely possible, but for the majority of men, perhaps even for the majority of the perplexed, improbable. Perplexity is a state the thoughtful student must labor like a pack-mule to attain, and it is uncertain that he will, indeed, ever emerge from it. Maimonides is curiously inconclusive on this point; perhaps even he hesitated to leave a written record. The famous castle parable, where believers attempt to progress toward audience with God in the throne chamber of the castle,13  suggests to me that only the greatest prophets truly emerge from the state of perplexity.

Discussion of divine attributes is an especially difficult topic for textual interpretation because not only are these matters indemonstrable, but their very obscurity demands that the teachings—and even then, only the "chapter headings"14 —be communicated only to a student already capable of doing most of the work. Maimonides advises that one of the primary ways in which the perplexed can unravel his predicament is to understand thoroughly the principles of the Law and the essence of divine attributes which are contained within the Torah. As Maimonides demonstrates by his discussion of the confusion brought about by certain Hebrew phrases which make colloquial usage of parts of the body or physical characteristics, an instance of perplexity about a principle of faith is often rooted in an instance of perplexity about language. (The relative difficulty of the Book of Job leads Maimonides himself to construe one crucial verse, 42:6, based on his interpretation of a phrase which is a happax legomena [phrase attested only once].) Many Hebrew words and phrases in the Torah represent material concepts which are misleading when their spiritual uses are considered. Recognizing the indemonstrable is a necessary precursor to understanding the nature of a parable.15 

The driving point behind the Guide is that the perplexed who wishes to gain wisdom must cease trying to "demonstrate" the indemonstrable (in this case, specifically parabolic concepts of the divine) by way of seeking secular counterparts or material analogues. God’s governance of men in the world, Maimonides posits, is not at all comparable to men’s governance of themselves.16  The perplexed must interpret the text according to its indemonstrability and the limits of both his own mind and human language to express complex theological concepts:

But consequent upon this all-important position that divine governance and human governance are not analogous, I argue that Maimonides’ interpretation of the Book of Job and the Aqedah reveals an explicitly political aspect of trial and adversity within a religious community. The narrative of the Binding is essentially linked to the Book of Job in Maimonides’ interpretation, where it serves the purpose of magnifying his explanation of divine providence by presenting another, more explicit episode of trial. The constitution of divine providence as "intellectual overflow"18  demands that spiritual trial have a very profound meaning for the religious community and a wiser, more deeply founded meaning for the perplexed.

The Book of Job examines divine attributes which cannot be demonstrated, but it is also the account of a believer developing from a lower belief of divine providence, namely that God rewards obedience materially, to a higher one which is an understanding that the ideas of human providence and divine providence are too distant from one another for interpretation by analogy. In Book I of the Guide, Maimonides makes it clear that there is no one method sufficient to interpret all parables because their texts vary in impenetrability as their content does in obscurity.19  In the Introduction, Maimonides cites seven of the main causes of perplexity in texts, beginning with the mundane (faults in the text to faults or its reader) but ending with the tantalizing possibility that:

Working with the simplification that each case of greater perplexity begins as a case of perplexity about language, Job is yet a better parable for examination: honeycombed with happax legomena, ambiguous grammatical constructions, technical terms of uncertain import and a strong Aramaic flavoring, the text of Job is so unusual for a Hebrew narrative as to raise some question whether the Hebrew text is merely a translation of an older Aramaic or Arabic text.21 Furthermore, the Book of Job is written in the language of metaphor, with constant reference to the role of humans in the natural world contained in the language of even God Himself. Finally, at the end of Chapter 42, Job’s conclusion is presented in six short verses (whose translation remains in dispute to this day); while his previous arguments about providence are extensively reiterated and examined, his final conclusions appear without prelude. The Book of Job is, in effect, a lengthy and intimate account of a crisis of beliefs ending in a quantum leap of faith: everything is upon the page for the eye to see except why or how the quantum leap was effected. The form of the parable serves to sift out readers who will be unable to understand Job’s final argument from those capable of reaching the limits of love and fear that divine providence requires. The very first phrase of the Book of Job, Maimonides asserts, is a command to consider and study the text carefully: he derives Uz from Utsu etsah, meaning let us take counsel together22 .

While Maimonides’ interpretation of the Book of Job is first and foremost an examination of man as a providential participant in divine governance, Maimonides’ conception of man’s adherence to a divine Law is set in an inescapably political framework. While the intended audience of the Guide is esoteric, the Guide’s reception into the world was inevitably exoteric.23  Maimonides makes it clear that the welfare of the body is an essential predecessor to welfare of the soul, and that the governance of the community is an integral part of the formation of useful habits and good moral qualities.24  While it is specious to attempt to draw conclusions about divine governance from principles of secular governance, it is nonetheless possible, through the existence of absolute Law given to the community of believers, for the secular and temporal to find an affinity in the divine and atemporal:

But it is obvious from the further chapters of Book III that even this atemporal Law is an uncertain and circuitous path to the proper governance of the state. Conflicting interpretations and useless speculation often obfuscate the true meaning of the Law, which is further blurred by the fact that many are not capable of grasping more than its rudiments.26  The welfare of the community depends upon how successfully the principles of the Law necessary for governance can be absorbed, and thus to what extent wrongdoing can be minimized and the utility of community members’ behavior can be maximized. Although "this … aim is the more certain one, and it is the one regarding which every effort has been made precisely to expound it and all its particulars," the hierarchy of intellectual abilities among believers means that some of the Law is intentionally obscure:

When the well-articulated principles of the Law connected with good governance and useful moral behavior are not understood or practiced, then the resulting chaotic governance of the community decreases everyone’s chance to achieve spiritual excellence. Spiritual excellence is the only path to either wisdom about divine providence or the operation of divine providence itself at a communal level, which Maimonides has illustrated in his discussion of trial.28  But the matter was already broached in the original discussions of divine providence, when Maimonides made an exact distinction between the Aristotelian opinion and his own:

In these inauspicious times, it is possible that a prophet might step forth to lead the people.30  A prophet in a role of leadership provides an intriguing connection between divine providence and political governance because he is responsible for providing the religious community counsel on political excellence which will make spiritual excellence possible for some of its members. Since political excellence stems from adherence to and propagation of the Law, the prophet must communicate to each type of believer in a manner commensurate with his abilities:

Hence the political connection is that all must be able to achieve enough intellectual perfection to adhere to the law and achieve its end of spiritual perfection, which is knowledge of God. A community which has turned away from this aim has no hope of intellectual perfection, that is, divine providence on a communal level. Strikingly, Maimonides quotes the saying of the Talmud, "Rabbi Simon ben Laqish said: Satan, the evil inclination, and the angel of death are one and the same."32  This somewhat enigmatic equation seems clearer given Maimonides’ assertion that Satan stems from a root meaning "to turn away;" thus, turning away from the Law is perverting what knowledge of God one has. Therefore:

Only cultivation of the good inclination34  can make spiritual excellence possible. Thus, while it is specious to regard divine governance on a level with secular governance, divine providence nonetheless allows some men to have the capacity to advise good secular governance. This not only allows a select few to achieve intellectual perfection, but also the entire community to achieve some measure of divine providence.

According to Maimonides, the aim and meaning of trial is "For the Lord your God tries you out, to know whether ye do love the Lord."35  There are two distinct sorts of knowing involved. The first means that the people are able to judge individually about whether a false prophet is trying to deceive their faith,36 but it also implies that the community should know how a political or secular trial affects divine providence: