The Concept of the Universe as a Divine "Imprint" in Plato’s <i>Timaeus</i> and in Doctrines of Medieval Jewish Thinkers
The article deals with the concept of the universe as an “imprint / impress”(<i>ekmageion</i>, <i>ektupōma</i>), made by the god-demiurge according to the “prototype” (<i>paradeigma</i>). This Plato’s metaphor could have influenced the formation of a number of creationist and emanational-emergent theologico-philosophical systems of medieval Jewish thinkers. A correlation of the verb ṭāḇaʿ (to ‘make an imprint’, ‘impress’, ‘mint’) with the cognate noun ṭeḇaʿ (originally ‘mintage on a coin’, something formed - an ‘element’, ‘creature’, but also ‘matter’, ‘substance’, later ‘nature’) is repeatedly attested inthe medieval Jewish philosophical literature. In many contexts, the term ṭeḇaʿ, used in the sense of ‘nature’, implicitly reveals its root meaning of ‘imprint’. As a result, the notion ṭeḇaʿ was interpreted as referring to the world as an “imprint”. The verb ṭāḇaʿ was used by the Jewish philosophers both in active and passive stem forms, especially in combination with the noun ṭeḇaʿ, producing the notion of “nature imprinted”. It may be assumed that some of them (in particular, Y. Gikatilla) could have correlated the Tetragrammaton with Plato’s god-demiurge in their doctrines of the world’s origin,referring “God” (ʾĔlōhîm) to the “prototype”, by which the whole cosmos is “imprinted”,in terms of likening this model to the “father” of the world, and the “nature” (haṭ-ṭeḇaʿ),regarded as a divine “imprint”, to the universe as an “imprint” of the “prototype”. The image of nature as an “imprint” of ʾĔlōhîm may have guided some Jewish medieval philosophers to think of the universe as the ex<i>pression</i> of God in His im<i>pression</i>.