על אברהם י״דOn Abraham 14
א׳
1[62] Under the force of an oracle which bade him leave his country and kinsfolk and seek a new home, thinking that quickness in executing the command was as good as full accomplishment, he hastened eagerly to obey, not as though he were leaving home for a strange land but rather as returning from amid strangers to his home.
ב׳
2[63] Yet who else would be likely to be so firm and unmoved of purpose as not to yield and succumb to the charms of kinsfolk and country? The desire of these may be said to be born and grow with each of us and is a part of our nature as much as or even more than the parts which unite to make the whole.
ג׳
3[64] And this is attested by the legislators who have appointed banishment as the penalty second only to death for those who have been convicted of the greatest crimes, though indeed, in my opinion, it is not second to death, if truth gives its verdict, but rather a far heavier punishment, since death ends our troubles but banishment is not the end but the beginning of other new misfortunes and entails in place of the one death which puts an end to pains a thousand deaths in which we do not lose sensation.
ד׳
4[65] Some men go on voyages for trading purposes in their desire for making money or on embassies or in their love of culture to see the sights of a foreign land. These are subject to influences driving them to stay abroad, in some cases financial gains, in others the chance of benefiting their country, when occasion offers, in its most vital and important interests, in others acquiring knowledge of things which they did not know before and thus providing at once pleasure and profit to the soul, for the stay-at-home is to the travelled as the blind are to the keen-sighted. Yet all these are eager to see and salute their native soil, and to greet their familiars and to have the sweet and most desired enjoyment of beholding their kinsfolk and friends. And often when they find the business for which they left home protracting itself they abandon it, drawn by the constraining desire for their own belongings.
ה׳
5[66] But Abraham, the moment he was bidden, departed with a few or even alone, and his emigration was one of soul rather than body, for the heavenly love overpowered his desire for mortal things.
ו׳
6[67] And so taking no thought for anything, either for his fellow-clansmen, or wardsmen, or schoolmates, or comrades, or blood relations on father’s or mother’s side, or country, or ancestral customs, or community of nurture or home life, all of them ties possessing a power to allure and attract which it is hard to throw off, he followed a free and unfettered impulse and departed with all speed first from Chaldea, a land at that time blessed by fortune and at the height of its prosperity, and migrated to Haran; then not long afterwards he left this too for another place, about which we shall speak after dealing with something else to which I now proceed.