על החלומות, ספר ב כ״טOn Dreams, Book II 29
א׳
1[190] We have explained one kind of vine, that which is the property of gladness, and the potent drink which it gives, undiluted wise counsel, and also the cup-bearer who draws it from the divine mixing-bowl which God Himself has filled to the brim with virtues.
ב׳
2[191] The other kind, the vine of folly and grief and wine frenzy, has already been explained in a way, but it is represented typically otherwise by the words spoken elsewhere in the Greater Song. “Their vine,” he says, “is of the vine of Sodom and their tendrils of Gomorrah, their grapes are grapes of gall, a cluster of bitterness to them. Their wine is the wrath of dragons and the incurable wrath of asps” (Deut. 32:32, 33).
ג׳
3[192] You see what the potent wine-cup of folly produces: bitterness, evil temper, sudden passionateness, deep anger, savageness, stinging spite, maliciousness. Most forcible are his words when he says that the plant of folly is in Sodom, for Sodom means blinding or making barren, since folly is blind and unproductive of excellence, and through its persuasions some have thought good to measure and weigh and count everything by the standard of themselves, for Gomorrah by interpretation is “measure.”
ד׳
4[193] But Moses held that God, and not the human mind, is the measure and weighing scale and numbering of all things. And he shews it in these words: “There shall not be in thy pouch divers weights, great and small. There shall not be in thy house divers measures great and small. A true and a just weight thou shalt have” (Deut. 25:13–15).
ה׳
5[194] And the true and just measure is to hold that God Who alone is just measures and weighs all things and marks out the confines of universal nature with numbers and limits and boundaries, while the false and unjust measure is to think that these things come to pass as the human mind directs.
ו׳
6[195] This eunuch and chief cup-bearer in one to Pharaoh, after seeing in his vision the parent plant of folly, the vine, goes on to picture it with three roots, to suggest the extremes which can be reached in sinning through the three divisions of time, for the root is the extreme.