R. Judah Loew ben Bezalel (Maharal) · 1598
Read the translation (PDF) · Editorial footnotes (PDF)
Maharal’s defense of the Aggadah — the non-legal portions of the Talmud — against the critics of his age, who read its stories as absurd, its science as discredited, and its authors as credulous.
Written in Prague in 1598 and cast as seven wells sunk toward a single spring, the book takes up the passages critics found most indefensible and argues that the Sages were not making the claims their detractors attribute to them. The recurring move is a claim about register: aggadic statements operate figuratively and conceptually, and read as literal physical assertions they will of course appear absurd — but that reading is the critic’s error, not the Sages’.
The structure matters to the argument. Each well is a descent toward the same source, so the book returns repeatedly to the same principle from different directions rather than advancing through a list of objections.
The challenge Maharal answers was sharpened by his own century. Where earlier readers might have found an aggadic passage merely puzzling, sixteenth-century critics could point to specific astronomical and medical claims in the Talmud that contemporary science had superseded — and conclude that the Sages had simply been wrong, and that their authority in other matters fell with it.
That places this book squarely in the corpus’s central question. Maharal was in Prague in the years when David Gans, his younger contemporary, was visiting Tycho Brahe at Benátky; Be’er HaGolah and Nechmad ve-Na’im are two responses to the same pressure, one arguing about how the tradition should be read, the other bringing the new science into Hebrew directly.
The translation is made from the Sefaria text of Be’er HaGolah. The work is accompanied here by a separate volume of editorial footnotes.