על השכר והעונש א׳On Rewards and Punishments 1
א׳
1[1] The oracles delivered through the prophet Moses are of three kinds. The first deals with the creation of the world, the second with history and the third with legislation. The story of the creation is told throughout with an excellence worthy of the divine subject, beginning with the genesis of Heaven and ending with the framing of man. For Heaven is the most perfect of things indestructible as man of things mortal, immortal and mortal being the original components out of which the Creator wrought the world, the one created then and there to take command, the other subject, as it were, to be also created in the future.
ב׳
2[2] The historical part is a record of good and bad lives and of the sentences passed in each generation on both, rewards in one case, punishments in the other.
ג׳
3The legislative part has two divisions, one in which the subject matter is more general, the other consisting of the ordinances of specific laws. On the one hand there are the ten heads or summaries which we are told were not delivered through a spokesman but were shaped high above in the air into the form of articulate speech: on the other the specific ordinances of the oracles given through the lips of a prophet.
ד׳
4[3] All these and further the virtues which he assigned to peace and war have been discussed as fully as was needful in the preceding treatises, and I now proceed in due course to the rewards and punishments which the good and the bad have respectively to expect.
ה׳
5[4] After having schooled the citizens of his polity with gentle instructions and exhortations and more sternly with threats and warnings he called on them to make a practical exhibition of what they had learned. They advanced as it were into the sacred arena and showed the spirit in which they would act bared ready for the contest, to the end that its sincerity might be tested beyond doubt.
ו׳
6[5] Then it was found that the true athletes of virtue did not disappoint the high hopes of the laws which had trained them, but the unmanly whose souls were degenerate through inbred weakness, without waiting for any stronger counter-force to overpower them, dropped down, a source of shame to themselves and derision to the spectators.
ז׳
7[6] And therefore, while the former enjoyed the prizes and laudatory announcements and all the other tributes which are paid to the victors, the latter departed not only without a crown but with the stigma of a defeat more grievous than those sustained in the gymnastic contests. For there the athletes’ bodies are brought low but can easily stand once more erect. Here it is whole lives that fall, which once overthrown can hardly be raised up again.
ח׳
8[7] The lessons which he gives on privilege, and honour, and on the other hand on punishments fall under heads arranged in an orderly series, individual men, families, cities, countries and nations, vast regions of the earth.
