Sepher Shamayim Chadashim [commentary to Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed]

A treatise by Don Isaac Abravanel on the creation of the world, consisting of four essays. In large part, as AbraBanel lays out in his introduction, the work is a philosophical exposition on Part 2, Chapter 19 of Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed, and adopts Maimonides’s exoteric view that the world was created ex nihilo. Abrabanel also engages here with Islamic and other Jewish thinkers, and discusses the purpose of Creation and the experience of the Divine Presence.