Crafting the Commandments
Albert D. Friedberg’s Crafting the Commandments has just appeared. The Seforim Blog is happy to present the following excerpt from the book’s conclusion. Scholars have ascribed far too much importance to Maimonides’ enumeration of the commandments and far too little to the motivations that lay behind his appropriation of R. Simlai’s aggadah as the basis for the enumeration and to the significance that Maimonides attached to this aggadah. The proximate reason for creating an enumeration was his need to have…
