Pharaoh’s List: Midrash and Apophasis

In sketching genealogies of Jewish theology it’s become something of a trope, I’ve found, to attribute all traces of apophatic thought — that is, those modes of thinking and writing theologically through a process of negation or construction of absence, also known as writing via negativa: “by way of denial” — to an ambiguous Platonic or Neoplatonic ur-source. I do not deny that there’s plenty of merit to this argument, particularly if one reads Maimonides (“the most influential medieval Jewish exponent of the via negativa”¹) as one of the central precedents for the apophatic gestures that would become commonplace in later Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalah. Indeed, the enormity of Maimonides’ influence was such that recent scholarship has gone as far to claim that apophasis as a theological strategy simply cannot be said to exist in Jewish thought until the late medieval or early modern period, before which it was an exclusively Greco-Christian phenomenon.  <a href="https://einsofist.medium.com/pharaohs-list-midrash-and-apophasis-8fa995b5ba7b">Click Here</a>