In these chapters, Maimonides sets out a spiritual Origin Story for the prophet Abraham, setting his intellectual revolution in the context of the beliefs held by the ‘Sabeans’ around him. The Sabeans, according to Maimonides, believed in the eternity of the Universe and considered the heavens to be divinities in themselves, with the Sun being the chief diety. The beliefs of the Sabeans, as related by Maimonides, are essentially those of ‘primitive religion’, or ‘paganism’, and were broadly identical to those of other ‘pagan’ peoples that populate(d) the earth; in particular, he mentions “the savage Turks in the extreme North, and the Indians in the extreme South”. For Maimonides, the gradual replacement of these primitive belief systems with Abrahamic ones is part of the systematic progression of the human condition, and accords with the Divine prophecy in Genesis 12:3 where God promises to bless those that bless Abraham and curse those who curse him.

It was Abraham who “became convinced that there is a spiritual Divine Being, which is not a body, nor a force residing in a body, but is the author of the spheres and the stars”. For Maimonides, this conviction went hand in hand with a rejection of the theory of the Eternity of the Universe and therefore a belief in a created Universe.

These chapters contain a detailed account of a purported book, ‘The Nabatean Agriculture’, by a certain Ibn Wahshiya. Maimonides’ belief is that “the principal purpose of the whole Law was the removal and utter destruction of idolatry, and all that is connected therewith, even its name, and everything that might lead to any such practices”, and in these chapters he tells the reader exactly what these practices were, in order to later justify some of the precepts of the Law, whose original purpose was to counteract these practices.

Maimonides takes an adimrably sociological approach to religion — at least, to pre-Abrahamic religion — and its relationship to superstition. He makes a connection between the development of agriculture and its attendant uncertainties, to the superstitious beliefs about how heavenly bodies regulate famine and plenty. For example,

The wise, pious, and sin-fearing men among them reproved the people and taught them that agriculture, on which the preservation of mankind depended, would become perfect and satisfy man’s wishes, when he worshipped the sun and the stars. If man provoked these beings by his rebelliousness, the towns would become empty and waste. The idolaters also held cattle in esteem on account of their use in agriculture, and went even so far as to say, that it is not allowed to slay them, because they combine in themselves strength and willingness to do the work of man in tilling the ground. … [thus] idolatry was connected with agriculture, because the latter is indispensable for the maintenance of man, and of most animals. The idolatrous priests then preached to the people who met in the temples, and taught them that by certain religious acts, rain would come down, the trees of the field would yield their fruit, and the land would be fertile and inhabited

It was to correct these superstitious beliefs that God sent Moses and the Law. Thus, Scripture teaches

that the worship of the stars would be followed by absence of rain, devastation of the land, bad times, diseases, and shortness of life. But abandonment of that worship, and the return to the service of God, would be the cause of the presence of rain, fertility of the ground, good times, health and length of life. Thus Scripture teaches, in order that man should abandon idolatry, the reverse of that which idolatrous priests preached to the people, for, as has been shown by us, the principal object of the Law is to remove this doctrine, and to destroy its traces.

Commentary Does Maimonides really believe that praying to ‘God’ will bring rain and plenty whereas praying to ‘the Heavens’ will bring drought and famine? Wouldn’t that mean replacing one superstition with another? It seems that, in a subtle way, Maimonides is gently teaching the reader that praying one way or another for the rain doesn’t actually do anything, and if Scripture teaches that it does, it is only because Scripture is concerned with stamping out idolatry and therefore simply teaches the opposite of the idolatrous practices that predated Abraham.