Philosophical Interpretation of Bereshit (Ralbag on Creation of the Universe)

Abstract

The philosophical and theological legacy of Rabbi Levi ben Gershon (1288–1344), better known as Gersonides or Ralbag, remains significant. Based on the study of the original text of Ralbag’s treatise Wars of the Lord, the article aims to identify and reconstruct the main principles of biblical exegesis employed by the Jewish philosopher. These principles were used to construct a vision of the creation of the world, which would correlate with both the Torah and the teachings of Aristotle as known to Jewish theological thought through Arab philosophers. Gersonides considered himself a follower of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides). Gersonides’s commentaries on the Torah and biblical commentaries and excerpts from the second part of the Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides were also studied to create a more complete picture of the exegetical methods used by Ralbag. It was shown that the basic principles of exegesis used by Ralbag to interpret the sacred text in a philosophical manner are: (1) the Torah is understood as a perfect law, containing no false teachings; (2) philosophical reasoning must be consistent with what the Torah teaches; (3) rigorous lexical and grammatical analysis of the religious text contributes to a clear understanding of the Torah; (4) the passages in sacred books are explained by using available knowledge about nature. It is shown that the main method used by Ralbag to interpret the biblical text is the distinction between the narrow and broad meanings of words, with subsequent examples of the use of these meanings in the Tanakh. These distinctions are applied in the first part of Bereshit (Genesis) to words such as beginning, earth, tohu and bohu, spirit [of God], light, dark, firmament of the heavens, water. Gersonides also provides examples of the use of these meanings throughout the Tanakh. Using this method, Gersonides builds an essentially Platonic scheme of the creation of the world while employing Aristotelian natural philosophical terminology. The primary source texts used in the article are also presented in Russian for the first time.