Complete Works

...or pick a few ears of grain to be placed upon the altars of the church as firstfruits of the crops, lest I be banished from the privileges of the temple as if I were not a true Israelite or were entirely without a contribution. The matter succeeded according to my wish; not indeed that I can do whatever they could not, but because they, following the precept of the law, did not wish to block the path for the industry of posterity, and moreover, such is the vastness and fertility of that field that no equal number of grains can exist. Thus, although nearly infinite and most powerful labors have exercised themselves within it with all their strength, we can still repeat that Gospel phrase: "The harvest is great, but the laborers are few."

Therefore, what the most holy men Ambrose and Augustine, and likewise Strabo, Bede, and Remigius, and from the more recent ones Giles and Albert, have written; and likewise among the Greeks, Philo, Origen, Basil, Latin commentators Theodoret, Apollinarius, Didymus, Diodorus, Severus, Eusebius, Josephus, Gennadius, and Chrysostom—these shall be left entirely untouched by us. For it would be both rash Greek commentators and superfluous for a weak man to exert himself in that part of the field where the most robust minds have long since exerted themselves. Likewise, concerning those things which either Jonathan or Onkelos or Simeon the Ancient handed down in Chaldean, or which from the Hebrews either the ancients Eleazar, Abba, Joannes, Neonias, Chaldean commentators Isaac, and Joseph, or the more recent Gersonides, Saadia, both Abrahams, both Moseses, Solomon, and Menahem have written—we shall make no mention of these at present.

But we shall bring forward, Hebrew commentators besides all these, seven other expositions of our own discovery and meditation. In these we shall first take care to overcome, if we can, three difficulties with which it seems there has been a great and difficult struggle for all those who Seven new expositions have undertaken to explain this book.

The first is lest anything said by Moses should seem either insufficiently stated or lacking in learning and wisdom. From this fiction some have freed themselves in this manner: that he spoke neither of all things nor brought forward great First and sublime matters because he was speaking to a crude people who were not sufficiently fit for the understanding of all things. We can believe that the crude listeners were satisfied if he covered the light of knowledge, which the wise might look into, with coarser words as if surrounded by a horn shell, lest the duller eyes be dazzled thereby. He brought the light, therefore, so that it might benefit healthy eyes; yet he brought it enclosed and veiled so that it might not harm those with bleary eyes. For he neither ought, nor could, nor wished to help the learned any less than the unlearned.

The second difficulty is Second difficulty that the tenor of the interpretation be consistent with itself, fitting in its own right, and that as if by a single stroke the whole series, from whatever sense it first proceeds, should be led back to that same sense, mindful of its purpose. Nor should we, if perhaps we introduce him here speaking of Ideas, have him deal with the elements in the next clause, or wish him to deal with man. This is an arbitrary and violent kind of exposition. Yet to avoid this in the explanation of this book has seemed to many—not to say difficult—truly laborious for all. So great is the complexity, so great the ambiguity, so great How difficult the variety of the entire reading. See of how much labor it is, and how it is not easy to do what we have easily conceived in our mind (would that we may achieve it!): that we might interpret this whole creation of the world not by one sense alone, but by a sevenfold sense, from the beginning, so that it always appears as a new work arising from an order of perpetual and unmixed exposition, using none of the resources of our predecessors.

The third difficulty third difficulty consists in this: that we do not make the prophet—indeed, the Divine Spirit through the prophet—assert anything strange or monstrous or alien to the nature of things as they are now seen, and to the truth which, discovered by the better philosophers, our own thinkers have also accepted.

But why seven expositions have been brought forward by us, by what reasoning they were undertaken, what our plan was, and what necessity impelled us toward them, and what exactly is new What reasoning for the undertaken exposition in this which we strive to bring forth, we shall make clear in the following chapter. In which [chapter], of him who [wrote] most absolutely on this matter—that is, on the creation of the world—in emulation of nature itself...