Q&A: Understanding Maimonides’ Words
Understanding Maimonides’ Words
Question
All the commandments that were given to Moses at Sinai were given together with their interpretation, as it says (Exodus 24:12): “And I will give you the stone tablets, and the Torah, and the commandment” — “Torah” means the Written Torah, and “commandment” means its explanation, and we were commanded to practice the Torah in accordance with that commandment. And this commandment is what is called the Oral Torah.
What does Maimonides mean?
Seemingly this contradicts what you said, that Maimonides also holds that at the revelation at Mount Sinai only a small number of laws were given to Moses from Sinai, along with the hermeneutic principles. If so, what is the correct understanding of his words?
Answer
Two possibilities: 1. The basic interpretations were given there. That does not mean everything was given there. It is very plausible that when some commandment was given to Moses, he was also given an explanation of it. 2. This is a normative statement, not a historical one. He was given the tools for interpretation and exposition, and the products of using them should be regarded as though they were given at Sinai.