על השכר והעונש כ״דOn Rewards and Punishments 24
א׳
1[137] Slavery to the free is a thing most intolerable. To avoid it sensible people are eager and ready to die and gladly run any risk in contending with those who menace them with enslavement. But an irresistible enemy is also something intolerable, and when both despotic power and hostility are combined in the same person, who can resist one to whom his authority has given the power to act unjustly and his implacable enmity the disposition to show no consideration?
ב׳
2[138] So he declares that those who set at nought the holy laws will have for their masters enemies who do not shrink from ruthlessness. And not only will they be brought into subjection by the aggressiveness of the enemy but will voluntarily and deliberately surrender themselves because of the distresses which hunger and lack of necessaries produce. For, in the opinion of some, lesser evils may be accepted to escape from the greater, though indeed is any of those here mentioned small?
ג׳
3[139] For in slavery their bodies will be exercised in doing service to cruel orders and still more cruel will be the distressing sights which will torture their souls and drive them to despair. They will see what they have built or planted or acquired become the heritage of enemies who enjoy the good things which others have owned and made ready. They will see them feasting on the fattest of their own cattle, slaughtered and dressed to give high delight and enjoyment to the robbers before the eyes of the robbed. They will see too the women whom they took in lawful wedlock for the procreation of true-born children, chaste domestic loving wives, outraged as though they were harlots.
ד׳
4[140] They will set about to defend them but apart from some struggling will be able to accomplish nothing, with their strength all gelded and their nerves unstrung. For they will present targets to all who wish to ravish, harry, rob, assault, wound and deal out injuries, outrage and destruction. No shaft will fall lame or impotent; a true eye and hand will carry them all to their mark.
ה׳
5[141] Cursed will they be in their cities and villages, cursed in their houses and farm buildings. Cursed will be the field and all the seed dropped therein, cursed the fertile parts of the uplands and every kind of cultivated tree. Cursed their herds of cattle, barren without hope of increase, cursed all their fruits, blasted at the very height of their ripening.
ו׳
6[142] Their store-houses full of provisions and money will become empty; no profit-seeking trade will flourish; all the crafts, the many-sided industries, the million ways of earning a livelihood, will prove useless to those who pursue them. Their hopes of attaining their ambition and in general everything which they take in hand will be frustrated by the evil practices or actions which their abandonment of God’s service heads and consummates. For these are the wages of impiety and disobedience.
