על בריאת העולם מ״הOn the Account of the World's Creation 45
א׳
1[131] Keeping to the sequence of the creation and carefully observing the connexion between what follows and what has gone before, he next says: “and a spring went up out of the earth and watered all the face of the earth” (Gen. 2:6). Other philosophers say that all water is one of the four elements out of which the world was made. But Moses, wont as he is with keener vision to observe and apprehend amazingly well even distant objects, does indeed regard the great sea as an element, a fourth part of the whole, which his successors, reckoning the seas we sail to be in size mere harbours compared to it, call Ocean; but he distinguished sweet drinkable water from the salt water, assigning the former to the land and looking on it as part of this, not of the sea. It is such a part, for the purpose already mentioned, that by the sweet quality of the water as by a uniting glue the earth may be bound and held together: for had it been left dry, with no moisture making its way in and spreading by many channels through the pores, it would have actually fallen to pieces. It is held together and lasts, partly by virtue of the life-breath that makes it one, partly because it is saved from drying up and breaking off in small or big bits by the moisture.
ב׳
2[132] This is one reason, and I must mention another which is a guess at the truth. It is of the nature of nothing earth-born to take form apart from wet substance. This is shown by the depositing of seeds, which either are moist, as those of animals, or do not grow without moisture: such are those of plants. From this it is clear that the wet substance we have mentioned must be a part of the earth which gives birth to all things, just as with women the running of the monthly cleansings; for these too are, so physical scientists tell us, the bodily substance of the fetus.
ג׳
3[133] And what I am about to say is in perfect agreement with what has been said already. Nature has bestowed on every mother as a most essential endowment teeming breasts, thus preparing in advance food for the child that is to be born. The earth also, as we all know, is a mother, for which reason the earliest men thought fit to call her ‘Demeter,’ combining the name of ‘mother’ with that of ‘earth’; for, as Plato says, earth does not imitate woman, but woman earth. Poets quite rightly are in the habit of calling earth ‘All-mother,’ and ‘Fruit-bearer’ and ‘Pandora’ or ‘Give-all,’ inasmuch as she is the originating cause of existence and continuance in existence to all animals and plants alike. Fitly therefore on earth also, most ancient and most fertile of mothers, did Nature bestow, by way of breasts, streams of rivers and springs, to the end that both the plants might be watered and all animals might have abundance to drink.