אליגוריות החוקים, ספר ב ט׳Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis, Book II 9
א׳
1[31] Having said this, we must show how the terms employed accord with it. “God cast,” he says, “a trance upon Adam, and he went to sleep” (Gen. 2:21). Quite correctly does he use this language. For the mind’s trance and change is its sleep, and it falls into a trance when it ceases to be engaged with the objects appropriate to it; and when it is not at work at these, it is sleeping. Rightly also does he say that this change or turning which he undergoes is not of his own motion but of God’s; that it is God who “casts it on him,” that is, brings and sends it on him.
ב׳
2[32] For the case is this. For if the change were in our hands I should have recourse to it, when I wished, and when it was not my deliberate choice I should then continue unturned. But as it is, the change is actually repugnant to me, and many a time when wishing to entertain some fitting thought, I am drenched by a flood of unfitting matters pouring over me; and conversely when on the point of admitting a conception of something vile, I have washed the vile thing away with wholesome thoughts, God having by His grace poured upon my soul a sweet draught in place of the bitter one.
ג׳
3[33] Now every created thing must necessarily undergo change, for this is its property, even as unchangeableness is the property of God. But, while some, after being changed, remain so until they are entirely destroyed, others continue so only so far as to experience that to which all flesh is liable, and these forthwith recover.
ד׳
4[34] This is why Moses says, “He will not permit the destroyer to come into your houses to smite you” (Exod. 12:23): for He does indeed permit the destroyer—(“destruction” being the change or turning of the soul)—to enter into the soul, that He may make it evident that what is peculiar to created things is there; but God will not let the offspring of “the seeing” Israel be in such wise changed as to receive his death-blow by the change, but will force him to rise and emerge as though from deep water and recover.