על הגירת אברהם ל״בOn the Migration of Abraham 32
א׳
1[176] “And Abraham was,” he says “seventy and five years old when he went out from Haran” (Gen. 12:4). On the number of the five and seventy years, whose import agrees with what has just been said, we will dwell in detail at a later time. Let us first examine the significance of Haran and of the removal from this country.
ב׳
2[177] No one versed in the Laws is likely to be unaware that at an earlier date Abraham migrated from Chaldea and dwelt in Haran, and that after his father’s death there, he removes from that country also, so that he has at this point already quitted two places.
ג׳
3[178] What remark does this call for? The Chaldeans have the reputation of having, in a degree quite beyond that of other peoples, elaborated astronomy and the casting of nativities. They have set up a harmony between things on earth and things on high, between heavenly things and earthly. Following as it were the laws of musical proportion, they have exhibited the universe as a perfect concord or symphony produced by a sympathetic affinity between its parts, separated indeed in space, but housemates in kinship.
ד׳
4[179] These men imagined that this visible universe was the only thing in existence, either being itself God or containing God in itself as the soul of the whole. And they made Fate and Necessity divine, thus filling human life with much impiety, by teaching that apart from phenomena there is no originating cause of anything whatever, but that the circuits of sun and moon and of the other heavenly bodies determine for every being in existence both good things and their opposites.
ה׳
5[180] Moses, however, while he seems to confirm the sympathetic affinity of its parts displayed throughout the universe, is at variance with their opinion concerning God. He endorses the former doctrine by declaring the universe to be one and to have been made; for if it came into being and is one, it stands to reason that all its completed several parts have the same elementary substances for their substratum, on the principle that interdependence of the parts is a characteristic of bodies which constitute a unity.
ו׳
6[181] He differs from their opinion about God, holding that neither the universe nor its soul is the primal God, and that the constellations or their revolutions are not the primary causes of the things that happen to men. Nay, he teaches that the complete whole around us is held together by invisible powers, which the Creator has made to reach from the ends of the earth to heaven’s furthest bounds, taking forethought that what was well bound should not be loosened: for the powers of the Universe are chains that cannot be broken.
ז׳
7[182] Wherefore, even though it be said somewhere in the Law-book “God in heaven above and on the earth below” (Deut. 4:39), let no one suppose that He that IS is spoken of, since the existent Being can contain, but cannot be contained. What is meant is that potency of His by which He established and ordered and marshalled the whole realm of being.
ח׳
8[183] This potency is nothing else than loving-kindness; it has driven away from itself envy with its hatred of virtue and of moral beauty; it is the mother of gracious deeds by which, bringing into created existence things that were not, it displayed them to view; for that which IS, though in opinion it be imagined everywhere, in reality shews itself nowhere, so that that is a most true oracle in which the words “Here am I” which describe Him—Him that cannot be pointed out, as though He were being pointed out, Him that is invisible, as though He were visible—are followed by the words, “before that thou wert made” (Ex. 17:6): for He is before all creation; His goings are outside it; nor is He present in any of the things that come after Him.