על שינוי השמות י״טOn the Change of Names 19
א׳
1[110] The above is one of the types indicated by the word Midian; another is the judicial, justice-dispensing type which by marriage is akin to the prophetic sort. “The priest” of judgement and justice, he says, “had seven daughters” (Ex. 2:16).
ב׳
2[111] The daughters stand as a symbol for the seven faculties of the unreasoning element, namely reproductive power, speech, and the five senses. “Daughters,” it adds, “who kept the sheep of their father,” for through these seven faculties come the advances and growths which repeated apprehension produces in the father, the mind. Each of these faculties “arrives at” its own, sight at colours and forms, hearing at sounds, smell at scents, taste at flavours, and the others at the objects appropriate to each in particular. Each “draws up,” so to speak, external objects of sense until they “fill the troughs” of the soul “from which they water the sheep of the father,” and by these I mean the purest of flocks, the flock of reasoning which brings with it at once protection and adornment.
ג׳
3[112] But then “arrive” the comrades of envy and malice, the shepherds of an evil herd, and drive them from the uses prescribed by nature (ibid. 17). For whereas the daughters take outside objects inside to the mind, which is as it were their judge and king, hoping thus under the best of rulers to perform their duty aright,
ד׳
4[113] the others beset and pursue them and give the opposite orders, namely that they should entice the mind outside and there deliver over phenomena into its hand. And in this way they will persist until the mind which loves virtue and is inspired by God, called Moses, shall “arise” from his former seeming quietude, protect and “save” the maidens from their subjugators, and nourish the flock of the father with words and thoughts, sweet as water to drink.
ה׳
5[114] And when the maidens have escaped the onset of those who are the mind’s enemies and have no aspiration but for the superfluities of life as though life were mere play-acting, they return not now to Jethro but to Raguel. For they have discarded their kinship with vanity, and become affiliated to the guidance and rule of law, resolved to become a part of the holy herd which is led by God’s Word as its name shews, for Raguel means “the shepherding of God.”