על שינוי השמות ט״וOn the Change of Names 15
א׳
1[91] Such a character the tokens given lead us to find in Joseph. Let us consider the nature of Psonthomphanech. His name means “mouth which judges in answer.” For every fool thinks that the man of wealth who lives surrounded by a sea of outward kinds of substance must of necessity be able to reason aright, be capable of answering questions put to him and capable of originating judgements of value. And in general the fool holds wisdom to be subordinate to chance, instead of chance to wisdom, as he should do, since the unstable ought to be guided on its course by the stable.
ב׳
2[92] And also his uterine brother is addressed by his father as Benjamin and by his mother as Son of sorrow, and that is true to facts. For Benjamin by interpretation is Son of days, and the day is illumined by the sunlight visible to our senses, to which we liken vainglory.
ג׳
3[93] Such glory has a certain brilliance to the outward sense, in the laudations bestowed by the vulgar multitude, in the decrees which are enacted, in the dedications of statues and images, in purple robes and golden crowns, in chariots and four-horse cars and crowded processions. He who affects these things was with good reason named the Son of days, that is of the visible light and of the brilliance of vainglory.
ד׳
4[94] This name which exactly expresses the fact is given him by his father the head of the house, the reason. But the soul gives him the one that agrees with the experience by which she herself has learned. She calls him a son of sorrow. Why? Because those who are swept along by the current of empty opinion are thought to be happy, but are in reality most unhappy,
ה׳
5[95] for many are the counterblasts, envy, jealousies, continuous quarrelling, rancorous enmities unreconciled till death, feuds handed down successively to children’s children, an inheritance which cannot be possessed.
ו׳
6[96] And so God’s interpreter could not but represent the mother of vainglory as dying in the very pangs of childbirth. Rachel died, we read, in hard labour (Gen. 35:16, 19), for the conception and birth of vainglory, the creature of sense, is in reality the death of the soul.