Maimonides teaching
Don’t you just love that? As Dave Barry would say, Rambam would be an excellent name for a rock band, and I think Guide for the Perplexed would be a great album title, too. But they’re neither.
Rambam comes from the initial Hebrew letters of ‘Rabbi Moses ben Maimon.’ Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), as he is better known, was one of the leading Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages. His 1168 commentary on the Mishnah, the Siraj (‘Luminary’) was “a notable contribution to exegesis and scholarship,” says the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church.
His Guide for the Perplexed (‘Dux Neutrorum sive Dubiorum’) appeared in 1190. It deals with the existence of God, the creation of the world, the problem of evil and more. It exercised a profound influence on later Jewish and Christian thinkers (St. Thomas Aquinas, for one).
But not, so far as I can tell, on rock bands.
Note: This post is #151 since I started blogging in 2009. I wasn’t sure I’d get that far. I’ve been experimenting with a new blog, wordsmatter (aka clevecallison.com), and put a short post on this topic there. I’m planning to have that blog be more devoted to questions of writing and language usage, and keep the personal-interest posts (such as this one) here.
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