Stage 3 · Moses Maimonides (1138–1204)

Moreh Nevukhim: Part I, Chapter 38 — Achor: The 'Back' of God and What Moses Saw

דלאלהֵ אלחאירין — The Guide of the Perplexed

Chapter 38 is one of the Guide's most compressed yet freighted chapters. Its subject is the word aḥor (אחור) — 'back' or 'behind' — but its real concern is the celebrated theophany of Exodus 33: Moses's request to see God's 'glory,' and the divine response that he may see God's 'back' but not His 'face.' Maimonides takes both senses of aḥor — (1) the literal back, and (2) the following or tracing of a path — and reads the theophany through the second sense. To 'see God's back' means to follow in God's wake: to trace the effects and consequences of His governance in creation, not to perceive His essence directly. The verse 'you shall see that which follows Me' becomes a charter for Maimonides' entire program of negative theology — the intellect can know what God does (His governance of nature, the chain of causality He sustains), but cannot apprehend what God is. The chapter thus functions as a pivot between the lexical chapters that precede it and the fuller philosophical treatments of divine attributes and providence that follow later in the Guide.

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Part One · Chapter Thirty-Eight — Achor: The 'Back' of God and What Moses Saw

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Aḥor is an equivocal term. It is the name for the back: 'the back of the Tabernacle' (Ex 26:12); 'and the spear came out from behind him' (2 Sam 2:23). And it can be a temporal particle, in the sense of 'after': 'after him there arose none like him' (2 Kgs 23:25); 'after these things' (Gen 15:1) — and this is frequent.

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And it has the meaning of following and tracing the track in walking in the way of a person: 'after the Lord your God shall you walk' (Deut 13:5); 'after the Lord shall they walk' (Hos 11:10) — meaning: following in obedience to Him, tracing the track of His acts, and walking in His way; 'he walked after Zau' (1 Kgs 21:26). According to this sense it is said: 'and you shall see My back' — meaning: you shall apprehend that which follows from Me and resembles Me and is necessitated by My will, that is, all My creatures — as I shall explain in certain chapters of this part.

English is a working draft — alignment is sentence-by-sentence.

Scripture cited in this chapter

Genesis 22:1 ↗Deuteronomy 13:5 ↗I Kings 21:26 ↗Hosea 11:10 ↗