על הענקים א׳On the Giants 1
א׳
1[1] “And it came to pass when men began to wax many on the earth and daughters were born unto them” (Gen. 6:1). It is, I think, a problem worth full examination, why our race began to grow so numerous after the birth of Noah and his sons. Yet perhaps it is not difficult to render a reason. For when the rarity appears, its opposite always is found in abundance.
ב׳
2[2] And therefore the ability of the individual shows up the absence of ability in the crowd, and examples of skill in any of the arts and sciences, or of goodness and excellence through this rarity bring out of their obscurity into the light the vast multitude of the unskilled in the arts and sciences, and of the unjust and worthless in general.
ג׳
3[3] Mark that in the universe too the sun is but one, yet it scatters with its rays the manifold and profound darkness which wraps sea and land. And so it is only natural that the birth of just Noah and his sons should make evident the abundance of the unjust.
ד׳
4[4] That is the nature of opposites; it is through the existence of the one that we chiefly recognize the existence of the other. Again, the spiritual offspring of the unjust is never in any case male: the offspring of men whose thoughts are unmanly, nerveless and emasculate by nature are female. Such do not plant a tree of virtue whose fruit must needs be true-born and excellent, only trees of vice and passions, whose off-shoots are feminine.
ה׳
5[5] This is why we are told that these men begat daughters, while none of them is said to have begotten a son. For since just Noah who follows the right, the perfect and truly masculine reason, begets males, the injustice of the multitude appears as the parent of females only. It cannot be that the same things should be born of opposite parents: the offspring must be opposite also.