אליגוריות החוקים, ספר ג י׳Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis, Book III 10
א׳
1[32] This is the ground for Moses’ words, “If the thief be found where he has just broken through and be smitten and die, there is no blood-guiltiness for him: but if the sun have risen upon him,(then he) is liable, he shall die in requital” (Exod. 22:1 f.). For if a man cleave and break through the tenet that stands firm in its soundness and uprightness, testifying of unlimited power as belonging to God alone, and he be found where he has broken through, that is, in the pierced and cloven doctrine that is conscious of a man’s own mind at work but not of God, he is a thief abstracting what belongs to another;
ב׳
2[33] for all things are God’s possessions, so that he who assigns anything to himself is appropriating what is another’s, and he receives a blow grievous and hard to be healed, even self-conceit, a thing akin to boorish ignorance. Moses does not make distinct mention of the man who strikes, for he is no other than the man who is struck; just as the man who rubs himself is also rubbed, and the man who stretches himself is also stretched; for in his own person he is at the same time active and passive, employs the force and submits to its effect. Even so he that steals what is God’s and assigns it to himself, is the victim of the outrage inflicted by his own impiety and self-conceit. A good thing it would be should he die when struck, that is to say permanently fail of the accomplishment of his purpose; for he must then be held to be less a sinner.
ג׳
3[34] For wickedness presents itself now as stationary, now as moving. It is wickedness in motion that is ripe for filling up its full measure by carrying its designs to completion, and so it is worse than stationary wickedness.
ד׳
4[35] If, therefore, the understanding which fancies itself and not God to be the cause of all that comes into existence die, that is, shrink into inactivity, blood-guiltiness does not pertain to it; it has not gone the full length of abolishing the living doctrine which ascribes to God the totality of powers. But if the sun shall have risen, that is the mind that shines so brilliantly in us, and shall have conceived the notion that it discerns all things, and decides all things, and that nothing ever escapes it, he is guilty, he shall die in requital for the living doctrine which he destroyed, which acknowledges God as the sole Cause. For he is found futile and dead indeed in himself; he has come forward as the author of a lifeless, mortal, and erroneous doctrine.