על שינוי השמות ל״הOn the Change of Names 35
א׳
1[186] “Abraham then has believed God,” but only as a man, so that you may recognize the weakness, the distinctive mark of the mortal, and learn that, if he swerves, his swerving arises only according to nature. But if that swerving is short and momentary, thanks are due, for many others have been overwhelmed by the rushing of the tide and died a violent death in the waters.
ב׳
2[187] For, good friend, if you believe the holy Moses, virtue is not sound-footed in our mortal and bodily nature, but limps ever so little and is subject to a sort of stiffness, for we are told that “the width of the thigh was stiffened, and he halted on it” (Gen. 32:25, 31).
ג׳
3[188] But perhaps some more courageous spirits might come forward and say that the utterance does not even indicate any disbelief, but a prayer, that if joy, the best of good emotions, is to be born, its birth should be confined to the numbers ninety and a hundred, that so the perfect good may enter on its existence under perfect numbers.
ד׳
4[189] The numbers here named are perfect numbers, particularly according to the sacred writings. Let us consider each of them separately. To begin with Shem, the son of the just Noah, the ancestor of the nation of vision; he is said to have been a hundred years old when he begat Arphaxad (Gen. 11:10), the meaning of whose name is “he disturbed affliction.” And surely it is excellent that the soul’s offspring should harass and confound and destroy injustice, afflicted and full of evils as it is.
ה׳
5[190] Abraham too “plants an acre” and adopts the hundred in measuring out the plot (Gen. 21:33), and Isaac “finds barley a hundredfold” (Gen. 26:12); and Moses in building the court of the tabernacle takes a hundred cubits in measuring out the distance from east to west (Ex. 27:9).
ו׳
6[191] And a hundred too appears in the firstfruit of firstfruit which the Levites offer to the consecrated priest (Num. 18:28), for when they receive the tenths from the nation, they are bidden to treat them as their own possessions and to give to the priest what may be called a holy tenth of tenths.
ז׳
7[192] And by observation we might discover contained in the laws many other examples in praise of the number here mentioned, but the above is quite sufficient for the present.
ח׳
8But if you separate from the hundred a tenth as the sacred first offering to God who brings the fruits of the soul to their beginning, their increase and their fulfilment, you will leave behind another perfect number, ninety, for it must needs be perfect, placed as it is in a debatable land between the first and the tenth ten, and thus serve to a separate sanctities from sanctities like the veil in the midst of the tabernacle (Ex. 26:33). by which things of the same genus are distinguished through division into their respective species.