14 - Belief, Knowledge, and Certainty

Summary

De’ot harbeh yesh le-qol eḥad ve-eḥad mi-bnei- ’adam, ve-zo me-shunah mi-zo u-reḥokah mi-mena be-yoter. Mishneh Torah, Sefer ha-Madda, Hilkhot De’ot, 1 Multiple ‘opinions’ are possessed by each and every human being, and each one is as different from another as it is distant from it.

’Ad ’ei-matai ḥayav lilmod torah? ’Ad yom moto. Mishneh Torah, Sefer ha-Maddah, Hilkhot Talmud Torah, 1, 10 Until when is one obligated to study the Torah? Until death.

Gnothi se auton. The Delphic Oracle Know thyself.

Pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a22. By nature, all human beings desire to know.

PROLEGOMENON

The plurality of Hebrew terms denoting knowledge, as well as the lack of a clear distinction between knowledge and belief, is rarely, if ever, reflected in translation. In fact, the same Hebrew term is sometimes translated as “knowledge,” at others, as “belief,” and at yet others as terms that the modern reader would not recognize as a species of either knowledge or belief. I begin this chapter with two citations from Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and two from the Greek philosophical tradition to focus on the problematic nature of “knowledge,” as well as caution against attempts to neatly fit ancient and medieval philosophical terms and concepts into what initially may appear to be their modern and contemporary equivalents. The two terms used by Maimonides in the first two epigraphs, de’ot and limud Torah, respectively, exemplify this difficulty. In particular, the term de’ot, (sing. de’ah) can denote opinion, knowledge, and even character.