R. Levi ben Gershom · c. 1329
Read the translation (PDF) · Editorial footnotes (PDF)
The Wars of the Lord is the philosophical and theological masterwork of Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288–1344), one of the boldest minds of medieval Provence. Written over many years and completed in 1329, it confronts the hardest questions where Aristotelian philosophy and the Torah collide, and refuses easy answers.
Six treatises, each divided into chapters. The first, on the immortality of the soul, runs to fourteen chapters and sets the method for everything that follows: Gersonides lays out the positions of his predecessors — the view of Avicenna, the view of al-Farabi — examines each on its merits, and then argues his own. The remaining treatises take up the nature of prophecy and dreams, whether God knows individual future events, divine providence, the heavens and their movers, and the creation of the world.
The fifth treatise is where this book meets the rest of the corpus. Its first part is a complete system of mathematical astronomy — Sefer HaTechunah, translated separately here — because for Gersonides the question of the heavens and their movers could not be settled philosophically without first establishing, by observation, how the heavens actually move.
Gersonides is the most uncompromising of the medieval Jewish rationalists. On divine knowledge of future particulars he reaches a conclusion that troubled readers for centuries, and he dissents from Maimonides wherever he judges the argument requires it — not as provocation but as method. What makes the Wars formidable is that the dissents are earned: he was a working astronomer who built his own instruments, and he brought the same insistence on demonstration to metaphysics.
The translated source is the printed edition digitized by the Internet Archive, which presents the Hebrew under the German title Die Kämpfe Gottes and carries the words of Jacob Marcaria alongside the author’s own introduction.