INTRODUCING THE SABIANS

To understand this chapter—which sets up the fundamental reason for mitsvot that Rambam will come back to repeatedly—a little history is in order. Rambam believed (and had literature in his day that led him to believe) that the paganism of Ur Kasdim (where Avraham grew up) was a religion called Sabianism. The adherents, the Sabians, believed that the sun and the moon were the major deities (along with the "seven stars"—Pines does not explain which stars are meant, perhaps it is the planets), and that they had control over the upper and lower realms. The most sophisticated view among the Sabians was that the deity is the spirit of the universe, and that the sphere and the stars (meaning the various parts of the universe) are the body of that spirit.

Either way, it means that the world is God in some way, or that parts of the world control the rest of it. (You may remember the midrashim that say that Avraham started out thinking that the sun was God, and rejected that when night time came—those midrashim support this notion of the beliefs of Avraham’s time). It also means, absolutely, that the world is eternal (since the controlling part of the world, the god as it were, is part of the world). That would mean, then, that there was no "first" man and that Adam—whom the Sabians included in their stories—was actually born from a man and a woman, just like the rest of us.

THE NABATEAN AGRICULTURE

Rambam believed that he knew what the Sabians thought because he had read, and apparently read carefully, a work called "The Nabatean Agriculture" which purports to lay out Sabian thought (Rambam promises to explain the connection between their thought and agriculture later in the work). I would point out that halakhah allows consulting works of idolatry to know how to refute those who would argue in favor of it and also to know how to identify it among Jews and punish it appropriately. Rambam has found another use of studying idol worship—it explains, for him, many elements of the Torah and the reasons for the mitsvot.

Rambam explains their ideas at great length, because he believes many of the mitsvot are meant to counteract their beliefs, beliefs that ruled the world at Avraham’s time, and at the time of the giving of the Torah. The problem with the Nabatean agriculture is that it is, as far as anyone can tell, a forgery. (There has, throughout history, been a long tradition of forging works, among Jews as well as non-Jews; an historian published an interesting little book on it, but I cannot remember either his name or the name of the book—I think its called "Fakes and Forgeries." Any help would be welcome). The supposed translator (in 904 CE) was apparently the author. There is little reason, then, for us to review all the details of Sabian thought that Rambam includes. I will therefore only make the points that I believe will be relevant to Rambam’s presentation of ta`amei mitsvot in the coming chapters.

IDOL WORSHIP

The Sabians developed idol worship, in Rambam’s presentation, by making images of the sun and the moon (the major deities) with the sun being gold and the moon being silver. They believed in addition, however, that these images had the ability to give prophecy to certain people, and that these statues and images had feelings of their own. That meant that if one gave an offering to the statue (or to the prophet of that statue) it could help insure a better future. It was in this way, Rambam says, that the worship of Baal and Asherah (idols representing the deities) became entrenched.

I would point out—just because we see them as so different—that Ramban offers a fairly similar picture of the development of idolatry in the Commentary on the Torah. In Ramban’s presentation, people began worshipping the spheres (since they rule over the Earth as messengers of God), then the images of the spheres that they made for themselves. I don’t know if Ramban took the idea from Rambam, but the similarity is noteworthy.

That history explains for Rambam (as we’ll see numerous times) many of the laws of the Torah—it was meant to counteract the erroneous beliefs of the Sabians. All the forms of magic that the Torah prohibits, for example, Rambam finds in the Nabatean agriculture, so that he sees the prohibition as being the Torah’s way to train people away from those pagan beliefs and back to the realization that God does not have a body, is not part of this world, and so on.

THE PROBLEM FOR MODERN OBSERVANCE

Rambam’s reason, while certainly serving an intellectual purpose in that it gives a rational explanation for the Torah’s laws, creates other problems, such as why those prohibitions should stay in place. If, for example, the problem with witchcraft (or attempted witchcraft, since Rambam does not believe it works) is that the Sabians used to believe that it was part of the worship of the sun and the moon, etc., then why can’t I—who firmly know that the sun and the moon are not deities—indulge in a little witchcraft?

This is not an issue Rambam addresses directly, leading many people to speculate in different ways. As I believe I’ve mentioned, Prof. Twersky ztllh"h thought Rambam was only providing one reason for each mitsvah, to show to everyone the Torah’s rationality (at least in its originally being given); he might have believed there were other reasons as well. This is not an issue that we can fully discuss now (unless people ask questions about it), but is worth keeping in mind, particularly if we come across reasons that we find unsatisfying.

AVRAHAM’S ROLE IN THE BATTLE AGAINST IDOLATRY

Rambam notes that the Nabatean agriculture also tells the story of Avraham rejecting idolatry; in their version, he gets imprisoned, debates with great skill for a long time, and finally the king of the Sabians exiles him to avoid his convincing other Sabians of the truth of his beliefs. In Mishneh Torah, as well, Rambam pictures Avraham as spreading the notion of a unique God through preaching while Moshe did it by being given a law from God.

I would note that in Rambam’s presentation of Avraham’s ideas (battling Sabianism), he includes Avraham’s claim that God created the world in time, meaning that it did not last an eternity. If you recall that modern scholars debate what Rambam’s actual beliefs were regarding the Creation of the World (with most academics believing that Rambam actually subscribed to Aristotle’s belief in its eternity), we have another example of an incidental comment of Rambam’s strongly suggesting that they were wrong.

In presenting Avraham’s arguments against the Sabians, Rambam could have easily left out the whole issue of the eternity of the world—it’s not relevant to mitsvot and their reasons, nor do midrashic sources make a big deal over Avraham’s having discovered that the world was created in time. The essential discovery of Avraham was that God was not a celestial body, indeed that God does not have a body at all. When Rambam throws in the idea that Avraham combated the view that the world was eternal, he seems to incidentally confirm his belief that it was created in time. (For review: I believe we saw a similar phenomenon with Job, where Rambam attached Job’s original view to Aristotle, saying that he, like Aristotle, did not believe that God presently attended to the world. That implies that when Job found out the truth, he saw the error in Aristotle’s ways. Here, too, he is putting ideas into Avraham’s mouth that contradict Aristotle’s view when he doesn’t have to.).

To sum up, Rambam believes that much of the Law of the Torah is there to combat the Sabian belief that the sun and the moon control the earth—in particular agriculture, as we will see next chapter—leading to the belief that we must worship them, with various kinds of idol worship, to gain their favor. In contrast, Rambam says, the Torah is there to stress that the only thing necessary for successful living is fear and love of God, and that this is the Torah’s major message. Next week, we’ll do two chapters, a short one on the Sabian belief that the sun controls agriculture, and what that led to, and then one on the religious importance of knowing that there are reasons for the commandments.