על בריאת העולם ל״חOn the Account of the World's Creation 38
א׳
1[111] Let what has been said suffice as a bare outline of the dignity pertaining to the figure or scheme or whatever we ought to call it: all these qualities and more still does 7 discover in the incorporeal and intellectual sphere. But its nature reaches further, extending to all visible existence, to heaven and earth, to the utmost bounds of the universe. For what part of the world’s contents is not a lover of seven, overcome by passion and desire for it? Let us give some instances.
ב׳
2[112] They tell us that heaven is girdled by seven zones, whose names are these: arctic, antarctic, that of the summer solstice, that of the winter solstice, equinox, zodiac, and beside these the milky way. The horizon is not one of these, for it is a thing of subjective observation, our eyesight, as it is keen or the reverse, cutting off, now a smaller, now a larger, circumference.
ג׳
3[113] Moreover, the planets, the heavenly host that moves counter to the fixed stars, are marshalled in seven ranks, and manifest large sympathy with air and earth. The one (the air) they turn and shift for the so-called annual seasons, producing in each of these seasons a thousand changes by times of calm, or fair weather, of cloudy skies, of unusually violent storms: they flood rivers and shrink them; they turn plains into marshes, and dry them up again: they produce tides in the sea, as it ebbs and flows: for at times broad gulfs, through the sea’s being withdrawn by ebbing, suddenly become a far-reaching stretch of sand, and a little later, as it is poured back, they become deep seas navigable not merely by small barges but by ships of many tons burden. Yes, and the planets cause all things on earth, living creatures and fruit-yielding plants, to grow and come to perfection, enabling, as they do, the natural power in each of them to run its full round, new fruits blossoming and ripening on old trees, to supply abundantly those who need them.