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Updated: May 2, 2025
Bahya and Abraham bar Hiyya confine their philosophical outlook within still narrower limits, having Jewish ethics as their primary concern. All of the latter make a feature of Biblical interpretation, which lends to their work the Jewish stamp and to their style the element of homeliness and variety.
At the same time others who are not Israelites are not excluded from reaching the same degree through repentance. There is no system of ethics in Abraham bar Hiyya, and we shall in the sequel select some of his remarks bearing on ethics and pick out the ethical kernel from its homiletical and exegetical husk. Man alone, he tells us, of all animal creation receives reward and punishment.
The general philosophical standpoint of Abraham bar Hiyya may be characterized as an uncertain Neo-Platonism, or a combination of fundamental Aristotelian ideas with a Neo-Platonic coloring. Thus matter and form are the fundamental principles of the world. They existed potentially apart in the wisdom of God before they were combined and thus realized in actuality.
God produces the positive forms which are good, and determines them to stay a definite length of time. When this time comes to an end, the forms disappear and their negatives take their place automatically without the necessity of any cause. Abraham bar Hiyya is opposed to this solution of the problem, though he gives us no philosophic reason for it. His arguments are Biblical.
Abraham bar Hiyya also speaks of the purest form as light and as looking at and illuminating the form inferior to it and thus giving rise to the heavens, minerals and plants. This is all Neo-Platonic.
Other bad souls will be punished in various ways. Those souls which have good deeds but no knowledge will be placed in the terrestrial paradise until their souls recall the knowledge they had in their original state, and they will then return to the Garden of Eden among the angels. Abraham bar Hiyya, the Prince, as he is called, lived in Spain in the first half of the twelfth century.
But angels approached bearing axes, and they felled the trees, sparing a single one with three of its branches. When Hiwwa and Hiyya awoke, they repaired to their father, who interpreted the dreams for them, saying, "God will bring a deluge, and none will escape with his life, excepting only Noah and his sons."
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