Knowing God, of course, is very important in Maimonides’ schema.

“Not only is he acceptable and welcome to God who fasts and prays (صام و صلى), but everyone who knows Him (بل كل من عرفه). … The pleasure and displeasure of God, the approach to Him and the withdrawal from Him are proportional to the amount of man’s knowledge or ignorance concerning the Creator.

To know something is to know its attributes, and God’s attributes are nothing but his actions, his tariqa طريقة, according to Maimonides. He finds support for this position in the story of Moses’ conversation with God. Moses asked God to ‘show me now thy way (tariqak طريقك), that I may know thee’ (Exodus XXXIII.13), which — according to Maimonides — is evidence that Moses knew that “God is known by His attributes, for Moses believed that he knew Him, when he was shown the way of God”.

God’s reply to this was “I will make all My goodness pass before you”. ‘all my Goodness’ is the word “kul-tubi כל־טובי” in Hebrew, which uses the same word as Genesis I.10 “And God saw that it was good tuv טוב). Thus, Maimonides seems to interpret the question-and-answer between Moses and God to mean that

  1. God is known by his ways, and
  2. God’s ways, i.e., his actions, are the works of this world: the stuff of creation.

Maimonides says that “God promised to make him comprehend the nature of all things, their relation to each other, and the way they are governed by God … The knowledge of the works of God is the knolwedge of his attributes”.

Another topic which Maimonides discusses in this chapter is the affects of God; Scripture very often refers to God’s mercy, anger, jealosy, or various other emotions. Needless to say, Maimonides is not willing to accept that God actually has any human-like emotions; he believes that

whenever any one of His actions is perceived by us, we ascribe to God that emotion which is the source of the act when performed by ourselves, and call Him by an epithet which is formed from the verb expressing that emotion.

There is also some discussion of providence in this chapter.

God creates and guides beings who have no claim upon Him to be created and guided by Him; He is therefore called gracious. His actions towards mankind also include great calamities, which overtake individuals and bring death to them, or affect whole families and even entire regions, spread death, destroy generation after generation, and spare nothing whatsoever. Hence there occur inundations, earthquakes, destructive storms, expeditions of one nation against the other for the sake of destroying it with the sword and blotting out its memory, and many other evils of the same kind.

He hints that these actions are not actually the result of various emotions experienced by God, but follow from God’s essence; he hints that a just ruler should act similarly in relation to his subjects:

At times and towards some persons he must be merciful and gracious, not only from motives of mercy and compassion, but according to their merits: at other times and towards other persons he must evince anger, revenge, and wrath in proportion to their guilt, but not from motives of passion

Although a concrete example was given regarding a hypothetical ruler, Maimonides ends the chapter by stating that the objectives of an ordinary person should be similar:

… for the chief aim of man should be to make himself, as far as possible, similar to God: that is to say, to make his acts similar to the acts of God