על השכר והעונש כ״וOn Rewards and Punishments 26
א׳
1[148] And if with all this they fail to learn wisdom and still go crookedly away from the straight paths which lead to truth, cowardice and fear will be established in their souls. They will fly when no man pursues; rumours false as they so often are will send them falling headlong, and the lightest sound of a leaf borne through the air will cause as much trepidation and quaking as the most savage war waged by mightier enemies. So children will take no thought for parents nor parents for children, nor brother for brother, expecting that mutual help will lead to destruction, and flight, each man for himself, to salvation.
ב׳
2[149] But the hopes of the wicked are not fulfilled; those who imagine they have escaped will suffer worse or at any rate no better fate than those who were captured earlier. Further if some elude their captors they will have to meet a reserve force of their natural enemies. These are wild beasts more ferocious than men, formidably equipped with their native weapons, whom God when He first made the universe created to put fear into those who could take the warning and to punish inexorably the incorrigible.
ג׳
3[150] Those who behold the cities with their very foundations demolished will disbelieve that they were ever before inhabited, and all the calamities, whether described in the law or not, which suddenly succeeded the bright days of prosperity, will become to them like a proverb.
ד׳
4[151] The wasting will pass into their very bowels and wring them with despair and sore distress; life will be made unstable and suspended as it were to a halter by one terror succeeding another, day and night, hustling the soul up and down, so that in the morning they will pray for evening and in the evening for morning through the palpable miseries of their waking hours and the horrible dreams which appear to them in sleep.
ה׳
5[152] The proselyte exalted aloft by his happy lot will be gazed at from all sides, marvelled at and held blessed by all for two things of highest excellence, that he came over to the camp of God and that he has won a prize best suited to his merits, a place in heaven firmly fixed, greater than words dare describe, while the nobly born who has falsified the sterling of his high lineage will be dragged right down and carried into Tartarus itself and profound darkness. Thus may all men seeing these examples be brought to a wiser mind and learn that God welcomes the virtue which springs from ignoble birth, that He takes no account of the roots but accepts the full-grown stem, because it has been changed from a weed into fruitfulness.
