על שינוי השמות ל״אOn the Change of Names 31
א׳
1[166] Well then might he laugh even though laughter seems to have been as yet unborn in our mortal race, and not only did he himself laugh but his wife also. For again we find Sarah laughed, saying in herself, “Not yet has this befallen me till now,” this unstudied, self-sprung good. Yet He that promised, she says, is “my Lord” (Gen. 18:12) and “older” than all creation, and I needs must believe Him.
ב׳
2[167] At the same time Moses teaches us this lesson that virtue is by its very nature a thing for joy, and that he who possesses it ever rejoices, while vice on the contrary is grievous and its possessor most unhappy. After this need we extol those philosophers who declare that virtue is a state of happy feeling ?
ג׳
3[168] For, see, we find in Moses the primary authority for this wise doctrine, since he pictures the good man as rejoicing and laughing, and elsewhere not the good man only but those also who come into company with him. “Seeing thee,” he says, “he will rejoice at it” (Ex. 4:14). He suggests that the mere sight of the worthy is enough to make the mind cast off the soul’s most hateful burden, grief, and to fill it with joy.
ד׳
4[169] And to none of the wicked is rejoicing permitted, as indeed the orations of the prophets proclaim: “Rejoicing is not for the impious, said God” (Is. 48:22). It is indeed a divine saying and oracle that the life of every worthless man is one of gloom and sorrow and full of misery, even though he affect to wear a smiling face.
ה׳
5[170] I would not say that the Egyptians really rejoiced when they heard that Joseph’s brethren had come. Rather they assumed in hypocrisy the appearance of joy. For no fool when confronted by conviction is pleased with it, any more than the dissolute man on his sick-bed with the physician. For the profitable is followed by toil, the noxious by ease. And fools because they prefer ease to toil are naturally at enmity with those who would advise them to their profit.
ו׳
6[171] And so when you hear that “Pharaoh rejoiced and his servants” (Gen. 45:16) at the coming of the brothers of Joseph, do not suppose that they were really pleased, except perhaps at one thought: they expected once more to lead away the mind to desert its foster-brethren the goods of the soul for the numberless lusts of the body, and to debase its old ancestral coinage, the coinage of virtue its birth-fellow.