על השכר והעונש י״חOn Rewards and Punishments 18
א׳
1[106] In those days he says your vast prosperity and opulence will cause you to do to others what you now suffer from them. Now because you pay no respect to the laws or ancestral customs, but despise the whole body of them, you lack bare necessities and wait upon the houses of money lenders and usurers and borrow at high interest.
ב׳
2[107] But then, as I said, you will do the opposite, for in the abundance of your opulence you will yourself lend to others, not few loans nor to few, but many and to many, nay rather to whole nations. For prosperity will attend you in everything both in the city and in the country; in the city by offices, honours and reputations through justice well administered, through policy well considered, through words and deeds directed to serve the common weal: in the land by the fertility both of the necessaries, corn, wine and oil, and the means of enjoyable life, that is the numberless kinds of tree fruits, and also by the fruitful multiplying of oxen and goats and other cattle.
ג׳
3[108] But someone may say, what profit is there in all this to one who is not going to leave behind him heirs and successors? And therefore he crowns his boons by saying that no man shall be childless and no. woman barren, but all the true servants of God will fulfil the law of nature for the procreation of children.
ד׳
4[109] For men will be fathers and women mothers both happy in those they beget or bear, so that each family will be a plenitude with a long list of kinsfolk, with no part nor any of the names which signify relationship missing. In the upper line will be parents, uncles, grandparents, likewise in the lower line sons, brothers, brothers’ sons, grandsons, daughters’ sons, cousins, cousins’ sons, in fact all that are allied by blood.
ה׳
5[110] And none of those who conform to the laws will die an early death or be cut short, or denied any stage of life that God has assigned to the human race, but each will rise as by stepping-stones from infancy through the successive terms appointed to every age, fulfilling its allotted tale until he reaches the last, the neighbour of death or rather immortality, and passes from that truly goodly old age to leave a great house of goodly children to fill his place.
