Condemned by Maimonides, Defended by Later Mystics

Shiur Qomah provoked strong rejection from rationalist medieval Jewish philosophers, most notably Maimonides, who regarded a literal reading of the text as bordering on heresy and, in some of his writing, questioned whether it should be considered authentically ancient at all rather than a later, unreliable composition unworthy of the tradition it claimed to belong to. Defenders within later mystical circles, by contrast, generally read the text's measurements symbolically rather than literally, treating the vast numbers and divine names as encoded esoteric teaching about the structure of divine emanation rather than as claims about a literal physical body, an interpretive move that allowed the text to remain in circulation within mystically inclined Jewish scholarship even as mainstream rationalist theology continued to view it with suspicion.

Scholem treated Shiur Qomah as genuine and significant early esoteric material precisely because of, rather than despite, its theological difficulty, arguing that its very strangeness is evidence it preserves an authentic, if uncomfortable, strand of ancient Jewish mystical speculation about the divine that later, more philosophically polished Jewish theology worked hard to suppress or reinterpret.