The Guide for the Perplexed and the Death of Maimonides

Around 4950 Maimonides completed the Guide for the Perplexed. The title is exact: the book is addressed not to a simple believer but to someone who has studied both Torah and the science of his day and found them apparently at odds. Written in Arabic as letters to his student Rabbi Yosef ben Yehudah, it was translated into Hebrew by Rabbi Shmuel ibn Tibbon in the author's lifetime.

He treats what a code passes over: what the Bible's bodily language about God means (only imagery adapted to human speech); what we can know of the Creator (almost nothing positive — only the negation of deficiency); what prophecy is; where evil comes from; and whether the commandments have reasons accessible to reason. He answers that they do — provoking both admiration and outrage.

Maimonides died on the twentieth of Tevet, 4965 (December 1204), in Fustat. By his will his body was carried to the Land of Israel and buried in Tiberias, still a place of pilgrimage. It is told that in Jerusalem a public fast was declared and the passage on the Philistines' capture of the Ark was read.

In the decades after his death the Guide set off a controversy that split Provence and Spain; but on his tombstone were written the words all eventually accepted: 'From Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses.'