Aligned sentence by sentence
·
Part One · Chapter Sixty-Five — Divine Speech: 'God Said' and 'God Spoke'
.
Nothing remains for you, after attaining this rank and verifying that He, exalted be He, exists — not with an existence that is one, not with a oneness — and that He is neither a body nor a force in a body; and you have learned from three chapters the science of the dispute concerning the attributes and we have sketched for you the method of negating them; and you have learned the sum of the matter from the totality of what we mentioned in those two chapters — nothing remains for you now but to negate every attribute additional to His essence, exalted be He. For whenever you have mastered the negation of what gives rise to the imagination of corporeality and of whatever approaches this imagination to any degree, your knowledge will be complete.
. . . . .
The aim of this chapter is that al-dibūr wa-l-amīra — speech and utterance — is an equivocal term that applies to articulation by the tongue, as in 'And Pharaoh said' and 'And Pharaoh spoke' and 'And she said to her'; and to will and volition, as in 'And God said: Let there be light' (Gen 1:3) — meaning He created the light by His will and volition, not that He vocalized, not that anything issued from His mouth. And likewise every 'And He said' that occurs in the context of the acts of creation. And it applies to speech that passed from Him to one of His prophets, in the manner that speech passes from one man's mouth to another man — as in 'for the Lord spoke to Abraham' and 'to Moses.' Upon this understanding we interpret the equivocality of this term.
. . .
Every utterance and speech attributed to God belongs to one of the latter two senses — I mean it is either a metaphor for will and volition, or it is prophetic overflow. The Torah never once speaks of Him vocalizing with a tongue. As for the statement that He spoke speech that was audible, and that this was by means of a stable voice just as a person hears the voice of a person — that is in a prophetic vision, as we shall explain when we speak of prophecy and of the capacity of the imaginative faculty. As for the statement that all Israel heard the divine speech established in the Ten Commandments — that was a created voice.
.
As for the metaphor for will and volition expressed through speech and utterance — as we have explained from the senses of the equivocality of this term — so too the meaning of every clause in which 'and He said' and 'and He said' occurs in the Six Days of Creation: consider each individual utterance in those verses and this will become clear to you.