על צאצאי קין ל״דOn the Posterity of Cain and his Exile 34
א׳
1[116] Accurately characterizing each one of these he goes on to say: “This man was a wielder of the hammer, a smith in brass and iron work” (Gen. 4:22). For the soul that is vehemently concerned about bodily pleasures or the materials of outward things, is being ever hammered on an anvil, beaten out by the blows of his desires with their long swoop and reach. Always and everywhere you may see those who care for their bodies more than anything else setting lines and snares to catch the things they long for. You may see lovers of money and fame dispatching on expeditions to the ends of the earth and beyond the sea the frenzied craving for these things. They draw to them the produce of every region of the globe, using their unlimited lusts as nets for the purpose, until at last the violence of their excessive effort makes them give way, and the counter pull throws down headlong those who are tugging.
ב׳
2[117] All these people are war-makers, and that is why they are said to be workers in iron and bronze, and these are the instruments with which wars are waged. For any who are looking into the matter would find, that the greatest quarrels both of men individually and of states corporately, have arisen in the past, and are going on now, and will take place in the future, either for a woman’s beauty, or for money, or glory or honour or dominion, or to acquire something, or, in a word, to gain advantages pertaining to the body and outward things.
ג׳
3[118] But for the sake of culture and virtue, which are goods of the mind, the noblest part of our being, no war either foreign or civil has ever yet broken out; for these things are by nature peaceful; and when they prevail, a settled condition of society, and the reign of law, and all things fairest to behold, meet, not the body’s dimeyed vision, but the keen sight of the soul. For while the bodily eyes see only the outward surface, the eye of the mind penetrates within, and going deep gets a clear view of all that is hidden up in the very heart.
ד׳
4[119] It is an invariable rule that broils and factions arise among men scarcely ever about anything else than what is in reality a shadow. For the lawgiver named the manufacturer of weapons of war, of brass and iron, Thobel son of Sella the shadow, and his philosophy depends not on verbal artifices, but on surpassing beauty of conception. For he was aware that every naval or land force chooses the greatest dangers for the sake of bodily pleasures or to gain a superabundance of things outward, no one of which is proved sure and stable by all-testing time; for those things resemble pictures that are mere superficial delineations of solid objects, and fade away of themselves.