על עשרת הדברות ט׳On the Decalogue 9
א׳
1[32] These points have been sufficiently discussed and may now be left. We must proceed to carry on the discussion to embrace what follows next. The ten words or oracles, in reality laws or statutes, were delivered by the Father of All when the nation, men and women alike, were assembled together. Did He do so by His own utterance in the form of a voice? Surely not: may no such thought ever enter our minds, for God is not as a man needing mouth and tongue and windpipe.
ב׳
2[33] I should suppose that God wrought on this occasion a miracle of a truly holy kind by bidding an invisible sound to be created in the air more marvellous than all instruments and fitted with perfect harmonies, not soulless, nor yet composed of body and soul like a living creature, but a rational soul full of clearness and distinctness, which giving shape and tension to the air and changing it to flaming fire, sounded forth like the breath through a trumpet an articulate voice so loud that it appeared to be equally audible to the farthest as well as the nearest.
ג׳
3[34] For it is the nature of men’s voices if carried to a great distance to grow faint so that persons afar off have but an indistinct impression which gradually fades away with each lengthening of the extension, since the organism which produces them also is subject to decay.
ד׳
4[35] But the new miraculous voice was set in action and kept in flame by the power of God which breathed upon it and spread it abroad on every side and made it more illuminating in its ending than in its beginning by creating in the souls of each and all another kind of hearing far superior to the hearing of the ears. For that is but a sluggish sense, inactive until aroused by the impact of the air, but the hearing of the mind possessed by God makes the first advance and goes out to meet the spoken words with the keenest rapidity.