על השכר והעונש כ״בOn Rewards and Punishments 22
א׳
1[130] But besides these there are other sufferings waiting their turn to create want and destitution. The sources which nature uses to bestow her boons on mankind, earth and heaven, will become barren. Earth will destroy her fruit in the germ and prove unable to bring them to their fullness. Heaven will be transformed into sterility, as none of the yearly seasons, neither winter nor summer, nor spring nor autumn arise to take their proper places but all are forcibly merged in formless turbid congeries by the dictation of an imperious power.
ב׳
2[131] For no downpour, no shower, no slight drizzle nor tiny dropping, no dew nor anything else that can promote growth will come. But on the contrary all that makes havoc of growing plants or destroys the ripened fruit will be provided to hinder them from coming to their perfection. For He says “I will make the heaven brazen to you and the earth iron,” indicating that both of them will fail to perform their proper functions for which they were made.
ג׳
3[132] For when did ever iron bear corn in the ear or brass bring rain, things necessary to all living creatures and particularly to men, whose life is precarious and full of needs? And the phrase suggests not only unfruitfulness and the ruin of the yearly seasons but also the sources of war and the intolerable and innumerable evils which war creates, for brass and iron are the materials from which the weapons of war are made.
ד׳
4[133] Earth too will bear dust, and powder will descend from Heaven above, bringing a very grievous cloud of smoke to choke and destroy life, and so no instrument of extinction will be left unused. Whole families will waste away from many into nothingness, cities will be suddenly left stripped of inhabitants, monuments of their past prosperity and the misery that swiftly followed, left to admonish those who can learn their lesson of wisdom.
