על עבודת האדמה א׳On Husbandry 1
א׳
1[1] “And Noah began to be a husbandman, and he planted a vineyard, and drank of the wine, and became drunken within his house” (Gen. 9:20 f.).
ב׳
2Most men, not knowing the nature of things, necessarily go wrong also in giving them names. For things which are well considered and subjected as it were to dissection have appropriate designations attached to them in consequence; while others having been presented in a confused state receive names that are not thoroughly accurate.
ג׳
3[2] Moses, being abundantly equipped with the knowledge that has to do with things, is in the habit of using names that are perfectly apt and expressive. We shall find the assurance just given made good in many parts of the Lawgiving, and not least in the section before us in which the righteous Noah is introduced as a husbandman.
ד׳
4[3] Would not anyone who answers questions off-hand think that husbandry and working on the soil were the same things, although in reality they not only are not the same things, but are ideas utterly at variance with each other and mutually repugnant?
ה׳
5[4] For a man is able even without knowledge to labour at the care of the soil, but a husbandman is guaranteed to be no unprofessional, but a skilled worker by his very name, which he has gained from the science of husbandry, the science whose title he bears.
ו׳
6[5] In addition to this there is the further point to be considered, that the worker on the soil is as a rule a wage-earner, and as such has but one end in view, his wages, and cares nothing at all about doing his work well; whereas the husbandman would be willing not only to put into the undertaking much of his private property, but to spend a further amount drawn from his domestic budget, to do the farm good and to escape being blamed by those who have seen it. For, regardless of gain from any other source, he desires only to see the crops which he has grown yielding plentifully year by year and to take up their produce.
ז׳
7[6] Such a man will be anxious to bring under cultivation the trees that were before wild, to improve by careful treatment those already under cultivation, to check by pruning those that are over-luxuriant owing to excess of nourishment, to give more scope to those which have been curtailed and kept back, splicing on new growths to stem or branch; when trees of good kinds throw out abundant tendrils, he will like to train them under ground in shallow trenches; and to improve such as yield poor crops by inserting grafts into the stem near the roots and joining them with it so that they grow together as one. The same thing happens, I may remark, in the case of men, when adopted sons become by reason of their native good qualities congenial to those who by birth are aliens from them, and so become firmly fitted into the family.
ח׳
8[7] To return to our subject. The husbandman will pull up by the roots and throw away quantities of trees on which the shoots that should bear fruit have lost their fertility, and so, because they have been planted near them, have done great harm to those that are bearing fruit. The science, then, that has to do with growths that spring out of the earth is of the kind I have described. Let us consider in its turn soul-husbandry.