על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר גOn the Special Laws, Book III
א׳
1BOOK III
On The Particular Laws Which Come Under Two Of The Ten General Commandments, Namely The Sixth Against Adulterers And All Licentiousness And The Seventh Against Murderers And All Violence
[1] There was a time when I had leisure for philosophy and for the contemplation of the universe and its contents, when I made its spirit my own in all its beauty and loveliness and true blessedness, when my constant companions were divine themes and verities, wherein I rejoiced with a joy that never cloyed or sated. I had no base or abject thoughts nor grovelled in search of reputation or of wealth or bodily comforts, but seemed always to be borne aloft into the heights with a soul possessed by some God-sent inspiration, a fellow-traveller with the sun and moon and the whole heaven and universe.
On The Particular Laws Which Come Under Two Of The Ten General Commandments, Namely The Sixth Against Adulterers And All Licentiousness And The Seventh Against Murderers And All Violence
[1] There was a time when I had leisure for philosophy and for the contemplation of the universe and its contents, when I made its spirit my own in all its beauty and loveliness and true blessedness, when my constant companions were divine themes and verities, wherein I rejoiced with a joy that never cloyed or sated. I had no base or abject thoughts nor grovelled in search of reputation or of wealth or bodily comforts, but seemed always to be borne aloft into the heights with a soul possessed by some God-sent inspiration, a fellow-traveller with the sun and moon and the whole heaven and universe.
ב׳
2[2] Ah then I gazed down from the upper air, and straining the mind’s eye beheld, as from some commanding peak, the multitudinous world-wide spectacles of earthly things, and blessed my lot in that I had escaped by main force from the plagues of mortal life.
ג׳
3[3] But, as it proved, my steps were dogged by the deadliest of mischiefs, the hater of the good, envy, which suddenly set upon me and ceased not to pull me down with violence till it had plunged me in the ocean of civil cares, in which I am swept away, unable even to raise my head above the water.
ד׳
4[4] Yet amid my groans I hold my own, for, planted in my soul from my earliest days I keep the yearning for culture which ever has pity and compassion for me, lifts me up and relieves my pain. To this I owe it that sometimes I raise my head and with the soul’s eyes—dimly indeed because the mist of extraneous affairs has clouded their clear vision—I yet make shift to look around me in my desire to inhale a breath of life pure and unmixed with evil.
ה׳
5[5] And if unexpectedly I obtain a spell of fine weather and a calm from civil turmoils, I get me wings and ride the waves and almost tread the lower air, wafted by the breezes of knowledge which often urges me to come to spend my days with her, a truant as it were from merciless masters in the shape not only of men but of affairs, which pour in upon me like a torrent from different sides.
ו׳
6[6] Yet it is well for me to give thanks to God even for this, that though submerged I am not sucked down into the depths, but can also open the soul’s eyes, which in my despair of comforting hope I thought had now lost their sight, and am irradiated by the light of wisdom, and am not given over to lifelong darkness. So behold me daring, not only to read the sacred messages of Moses, but also in my love of knowledge to peer into each of them and unfold and reveal what is not known to the multitude.
ז׳
7[7] Since out of the ten oracles which God gave forth Himself without a spokesman or interpreter, we have spoken of five, namely those graven on the first table, and also of all the particular laws which had reference to these, and our present duty is to couple with them those of the second table as well as we can, I will again endeavour to fit the special laws into each of the heads.
ח׳
8[8] The first commandment in the second table is “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” It comes first, I think, because pleasure is a mighty force felt throughout the whole inhabited world, no part of which has escaped its domination, neither the denizens of land nor of sea nor of the air, for in all three elements beasts, fowls and fishes all alike treat her with profound respect and deference and submit to her orders, look to her every glance or nod, accept contentedly even the caprices of her arrogance and almost anticipate her commands, so promptly and instantaneously do they hasten to render their services.
ט׳
9[9] Now even natural pleasure is often greatly to blame when the craving for it is immoderate and insatiable, as for instance when it takes the form of voracious gluttony, even though none of the food taken is of the forbidden kind, or again the passionate desire for women shewn by those who in their craze for sexual intercourse behave unchastely, not with the wives of others, but with their own.
י׳
10[10] But the blame in most of these cases rests less with the soul than with the body, which contains a great amount both of fire and of moisture; the fire as it consumes the material set before it quickly demands a second supply; the moisture is sluiced in a stream through the genital organs, and creates in them irritations, itchings and titillations without ceasing.
י״א
11[11] It is not so with men who are mad to possess the wives of others, sometimes those of their relations and friends, who live to work havoc among their neighbours, who go about to bastardize wholesale widespread family connexions, to turn their prayers for married happiness into a curse and render their hopes of offspring fruitless. Here it is the soul which is incurably diseased. Such persons must be punished with death as the common enemies of the whole human race, that they may not live to ruin more houses with immunity and be the tutors of others who make it their business to emulate the wickedness of their ways.
י״ב
12[12] Excellent also are the other injunctions laid down by the law on the relation of the sexes. It commands abstinence not only from the wives of others but also from widows in cases where the union is forbidden by the moral law.
י״ג
13[13] To the Persian custom it at once shows its aversion and abhorrence and forbids it as a very grave offence against holy living. For the Persian magnates marry their mothers and regard the children of the marriage as nobles of the highest birth, worthy, so it is said, to hold the supreme sovereignty.
י״ד
14[14] What form of unholiness could be more impious than this: that a father’s bed, which should be kept untouched as something sacred, should be brought to shame: that no respect should be shown for a mother’s ageing years: that the same man should be son and husband to the same woman, and again the same woman wife and mother to the same man: that the children of both should be brothers to their father and grandsons to their mother: that she should be both mother and grandmother of those whom she bore and he both father and half-brother of those whom he begot?
ט״ו
15[15] Even, among the Greeks these things were done in old days in Thebes in the case of Oedipus the son of Laïus. They were done in ignorance, not by deliberate intention, and yet the marriage produced such a harvest of ills that nothing was wanting that could lead to the utmost misery.
ט״ז
16[16] For a succession of wars civil and foreign was left to be passed on as a heritage to children and descendants from their fathers and ancestors. The greatest cities in Greece were sacked, and armed forces both of natives and allied contingents were destroyed: the bravest leaders on both sides fell one after the other; brothers slew brothers in the deadly feud engendered by ambition for sovereign power. In consequence not only families and independent territories, but also the largest part of the Greek world perished involved in the general destruction. For cities formerly well populated were left stripped of their inhabitants as monuments of the disasters of Greece, a sinister sight to contemplate.
י״ז
17[17] Nor are the Persians either who follow these practices exempt from similar troubles, for they are always engaging in campaigns and battles, slaying and being slain. Sometimes they are attacking the neighbouring populations, sometimes defending themselves against insurrection. For of insurgents many appear from many quarters, as the barbarian nature can never remain in quietude. Thus before the sedition of the hour is put down another springs up, so that no season of the year is reserved for a tranquil life, but summer and winter, day and night they are bearing arms, and so rarely does peace reign that they spend more time enduring the hardships of encampment in the open air than dwelling in their cities.
י״ח
18[18] I put on one side the great and magnificent triumphs of kings whose first exploit when they succeed to the throne is that worst of sacrileges fratricide—murders which they try to vindicate as reasonable by predicting that their brothers will probably attack them.
י״ט
19[19] All these things appear to me to be the result of the ill-matched matings of sons with mothers. For justice who watches over human affairs avenges the unholy deeds on the impious, and the impiety extends beyond the perpetrators of the deed to those who voluntarily range themselves with the perpetrators.
כ׳
20[20] But such careful precautions has our law taken in these matters that it has not even permitted the son of a first marriage to marry his stepmother after the death of his father, both on account of the honour due to his father and because the names of mother and stepmother are closely akin, however different are the feelings called up by the two words.
כ״א
21[21] For he who has been taught to abstain from another’s wife because she is called his stepmother, will a fortiori abstain from taking his natural mother; and if the memory of his father makes him respect her who was once his father’s wife, the honour which he pays to both his parents will certainly keep him from entertaining the idea of violating his mother in any way. For it would be the height of folly while acknowledging the claims of a half parentage to appear to treat with contempt the full and complete whole.
כ״ב
22[22] Next comes a prohibition against espousing a sister, a very excellent rule tending to promote both continence and outward decency. Now Solon the lawgiver of the Athenians permitted marriage with half-sisters on the father’s side but prohibited it when the mother was the same. The lawgiver of the Lacedaemonians, on the other hand, allowed the second but forbade the first.
כ״ג
23[23] But the lawgiver of the Egyptians poured scorn upon the cautiousness of both, and, holding that the course which they enjoined stopped half-way, produced a fine crop of lewdness. With a lavish hand he bestowed on bodies and souls the poisonous bane of incontinence and gave full liberty to marry sisters of every degree whether they belonged to one of their brother’s parents or to both, and not only if they were younger than their brothers but also if they were older or of the same age. For twins are often born who, although separated and disunited by nature at birth, enter at the call of concupiscence and voluptuousness into a partnership and wedlock which are neither in the true sense of the words.
כ״ד
24[24] These practices our most holy Moses rejected with abhorrence as alien and hostile to a commonwealth free from reproach and as encouragements and incitements to the vilest of customs. He stoutly forbade the union of a brother with a sister whether both her parents were the same as his or only one.
כ״ה
25[25] For modesty is lovely, why put it to shame? Maidens must blush, why drive the hue from their cheeks? Why hamper the fellow-feeling and inter-communion of men with men by compressing within the narrow space of each separate house the great and goodly plant which might extend and spread itself over continents and islands and the whole inhabited world? For intermarriages with outsiders create new kinships not a wit inferior to blood-relationships.
כ״ו
26[26] On this principle he prohibits many other unions, not allowing marriage with a son’s daughter or a daughter’s daughter, nor with an aunt whether paternal or maternal, nor with one who has been wife to an uncle or son or brother, nor again with a stepdaughter whether widow or unmarried, I need not say while the wife is alive, heaven forbid, but even after her death. For the stepfather is virtually a father whose duty is to set his wife’s daughter in the same position as his own.
כ״ז
27[27] Again, he does not allow the same man to marry two sisters either at the same or at different times, even if the person in question has repudiated the one he married first. For while she is still alive either as his consort or divorced, whether she is remaining in widowhood or has married another, he considered that the law of holiness required that the sister should not take the position which the wife has lost by her misfortune, but should learn not to set at nought the rights of kinship, nor use as a stepping-stone the fallen state of one so closely united to her by birth, nor bask at ease while enjoying and returning the caresses of her sister’s enemies.
כ״ח
28[28] For from this source grow grave jealousies and bitter feuds bringing with them train upon train of evils without number. For it is just as if the parts of the body were to renounce their natural partnership and place in the system and engage in strife with each other, thus producing incurable diseases and fatalities. Sisters though made as separate parts of the system are fitted into it and formed into a single whole by nature and identity of parentage. And jealousy is a most troublesome passion, creating if it breaks out grave evils unknown before and hardly to be cured.
כ״ט
29[29] But also, he says, do not enter into the partnership of marriage with a member of a foreign nation, lest some day conquered by the forces of opposing customs you surrender and stray unawares from the path that leads to piety and turn aside into a pathless wild. And though perhaps you yourself will hold your ground steadied from your earliest years by the admirable instructions instilled into you by your parents, with the holy laws always as their key-note, there is much to be feared for your sons and daughters. It may well be that they, enticed by spurious customs which they prefer to the genuine, are likely to unlearn the honour due to the one God, and that is the first and the last stage of supreme misery.
ל׳
30[30] Another commandment is that if a woman after parting from her husband for any cause whatever marries another and then again becomes a widow, whether this second husband is alive or dead, she must not return to her first husband but ally herself with any other rather than him, because she has broken with the rules that bound her in the past and cast them into oblivion when she chose new love-ties in preference to the old.
ל״א
31[31] And if a man is willing to contract himself with such a woman, he must be saddled with a character for degeneracy and loss of manhood. He has eliminated from his soul the hatred of evil, that emotion by which our life is so well served and the affairs of houses and cities are conducted as they should be, and has lightly taken upon him the stamp of two heinous crimes, adultery and pandering. For such subsequent reconciliations are proofs of both. The proper punishment for him is death and for the woman also.
ל״ב
32[32] Whenever the menstrual issue occurs, a man must not touch a woman, but must during that period refrain from intercourse and respect the law of nature. He must also remember the lesson that the generative seeds should not be wasted fruitlessly for the sake of a gross and untimely pleasure. For it is just as if a husbandman should in intoxication or lunacy sow wheat and barley in ponds or mountain-streams instead of in the plains, since the fields should become dry before the seed is laid in them.
ל״ג
33[33] Now nature also each month purges the womb as if it were a cornfield—a field with mysterious properties, over which, like a good husbandman, he must watch for the right time to arrive. So while the field is still inundated he will keep back the seed, which otherwise will be silently swept away by the stream, as the humidity not only relaxes, but utterly paralyses the seminal nerve-forces, which in nature’s laboratory, the womb, mould the living creature and with consummate craftsmanship perfect each part both of body and soul. But if the menstruation ceases, he may boldly sow the generative seeds, no longer fearing that what he lays will perish.
ל״ד
34[34] They too must be branded with reproach, who plough the hard and stony land. And who should they be but those who mate with barren women? For in the quest of mere licentious pleasure like the most lecherous of men they destroy the procreative germs with deliberate purpose. For what other motive can they have in plighting themselves to such women? It cannot be the hope of offspring, a hope which they know must necessarily fail to be realized; it can only be an inordinate frenzy, and incontinence past all cure.
ל״ה
35[35] Those who marry maidens in ignorance at the time of their capacity or incapacity for successful motherhood, and later refuse to dismiss them, when prolonged childlessness shews them to be barren, deserve our pardon. Familiarity, that most constraining influence, is too strong for them, and they are unable to rid themselves of the charm of old affection imprinted on their souls by long companionship.
ל״ו
36[36] But those who sue for marriage with women whose sterility has already been proved with other husbands, do but copulate like pigs or goats, and their names should be inscribed in the lists of the impious as adversaries of God. For while God in His love both for mankind and all that lives spares no care to effect the preservation and permanence of every race, those persons who make an art of quenching the life of the seed as it drops, stand confessed as the enemies of nature.
ל״ז
37[37] Much graver than the above is another evil, which has ramped its way into the cities, namely pederasty. In former days the very mention of it was a great disgrace, but now it is a matter of boasting not only to the active but to the passive partners, who habituate themselves to endure the disease of effemination, let both body and soul run to waste, and leave no ember of their male sex-nature to smoulder. Mark how conspicuously they braid and adorn the hair of their heads, and how they scrub and paint their faces with cosmetics and pigments and the like, and smother themselves with fragrant unguents. For of all such embellishments, used by all who deck themselves out to wear a comely appearance, fragrance is the most seductive. In fact the transformation of the male nature to the female is practised by them as an art and does not raise a blush.
ל״ח
38[38] These persons are rightly judged worthy of death by those who obey the law, which ordains that the man-woman who debases the sterling coin of nature should perish unavenged, suffered not to live for a day or even an hour, as a disgrace to himself, his house, his native land and the whole human race.
ל״ט
39[39] And the lover of such may be assured that he is subject to the same penalty. He pursues an unnatural pleasure and does his best to render cities desolate and uninhabited by destroying the means of procreation. Furthermore he sees no harm in becoming a tutor and instructor in the grievous vices of unmanliness and effeminacy by prolonging the bloom of the young and emasculating the flower of their prime, which should rightly be trained to strength and robustness. Finally, like a bad husbandman he lets the deep-soiled and fruitful fields lie sterile, by taking steps to keep them from bearing, while he spends his labour night and day on soil from which no growth at all can be expected.
מ׳
40[40] The reason is, I think, to be found in the prizes awarded in many nations to licentiousness and effeminacy. Certainly you may see these hybrids of man and woman continually strutting about through the thick of the market, heading the processions at the feasts, appointed to serve as unholy ministers of holy things, leading the mysteries and initiations and celebrating the rites of Demeter.
מ״א
41[41] Those of them who by way of heightening still further their youthful beauty have desired to be completely changed into women and gone on to mutilate their genital organs, are clad in purple like signal benefactors of their native lands, and march in front escorted by a bodyguard, attracting the attention of those who meet them.
מ״ב
42[42] But if such indignation as our lawgiver felt was directed against those who do not shrink from such conduct, if they were cut off without condonation as public enemies, each of them a curse and a pollution of his country, many others would be found to take the warning. For relentless punishment of criminals already condemned acts as a considerable check on those who are eager to practise the like.
מ״ג
43[43] Even worse than this is the conduct of some who have emulated the lusts of the Sybarites and those of others even more lascivious than they. These persons begin with making themselves experts in dainty feeding, wine-bibbing and the other pleasures of the belly and the parts below it. Then sated with these they reach such a pitch of wantonness, the natural offspring of satiety, that losing their senses they conceive a frantic passion, no longer for human beings male or female, but even for brute beasts. So according to the story did Pasiphaë the wife of King Minos long ago in Crete.
מ״ד
44[44] She was enamoured of a bull, but had no hope of obtaining its company. Consequently wild with passion, for amorousness is vastly intensified by unsuccess, she reported the trouble under which she was labouring to Daedalus, who was the best craftsman of his time. His masterly skill in devising plans for capturing the uncaptured enabled him to construct a wooden cow, into which he introduced Pasiphaë through one of its sides, and the bull supposing it to be a living animal of its own kind, charged and mounted it. She became pregnant, and in the course of time bore a half-beast called the Minotaur.
מ״ה
45[45] Probably, if passions are suffered to go unbridled, there will be other Pasiphaës, and not only women but also men will be frantically in love with wild beasts, which will produce unnatural monsters to serve as monuments of the disgusting excesses of mankind; whence possibly the Hippocentaurs and Chimeras and the like, forms of life hitherto unknown and with no existence outside mythology, will come into being.
מ״ו
46[46] Actually so great is the provisions made in the law to ensure that men should admit no unlawful matings, that it ordains that even cattle are not to be crossed with others of a different species. No Jewish shepherd will allow a he-goat to mount a ewe or a ram a she-goat, or a bull a mare, or if he does he will be punished as an offender against the decree of nature, who is careful to preserve the primary species without adulteration.
מ״ז
47[47] It is true that some people value mules above all other beasts of burden, because their bodies are compact and exceedingly muscular, and accordingly in horse-stables or other places where horses are kept they rear donkeys of huge size to which they give the name of “Celons” to copulate with the female colts, who then give birth to a hybrid animal, the mule or half-ass. But Moses, recognizing that the way in which this animal is produced contravenes nature, stringently forbade it under the wider order by which he refused permission for animals of either sex to breed with those of an unlike species.
מ״ח
48[48] In making this provision he considered what was in accord with decency and conformity to nature, but beyond this he gave us as from some far-off commanding height a warning to men and women alike that they should learn from these examples to abstain from unlawful forms of intercourse.
מ״ט
49[49] Whether, then, it is the man who uses a quadruped for this purpose, or the woman who allows herself to be used, the human offenders must die and the beasts also; the first because they have passed beyond the limits of licentiousness itself by evolving abnormal lusts, and because they have invented strange pleasures than which nothing could be more unpleasing, shameful even to describe; the beasts because they have ministered to such infamies, and to ensure that they do not bear or beget any monstrosity of the kind that may be expected to spring from such abominations.
נ׳
50[50] Besides, even people who care little for seemliness would not continue to use their cattle for any purpose serviceable to their life, but would regard them with abhorrence and aversion, disliking the very sight of them and thinking that even what they touch, that too must become unclean. And, when things serve no purpose in life, their survival, even if it can be turned to some account, is just a superfluity, “cumbering the earth,” as the poet puts it.
נ״א
51[51] Again, the commonwealth of Moses’ institution does not admit a harlot, that stranger to decency and modesty and temperance and the other virtues. She infects the souls both of men and women with licentiousness. She casts shame upon the undying beauty of the mind and prefers in honour the short-lived comeliness of the body. She flings herself at the disposal of chance comers, and sells her bloom like some ware to be purchased in the market. In her every word and deed she aims at capturing the young, while she incites her lovers each against the other by offering the vile prize of herself to the highest bidder. A pest, a scourge, a plague-spot to the public, let her be stoned to death—she who has corrupted the graces bestowed by nature, instead of making them, as she should, the ornament of noble conduct.
נ״ב
52[52] Adulteries detected on the spot or established by clear evidence are condemned by the law. But when they are a matter of suspicion, the law did not think good to have them tried by men, but brought them before the tribunal of nature. For men can arbitrate on open matters, but God on the hidden also, since He alone can see clearly into the soul.
נ״ג
53[53] So the law says to the husband who suspects his wife, “Draw up a formal challenge and come to the holy city with your wife and standing before the judges lay bare the suspicion which troubles you, not in the spirit of a false accuser or malicious schemer, set on winning at any cost, but of one who would strictly test the truth without sophistry.
נ״ד
54[54] The woman who is threatened with two dangers, one of losing her life, the other of bringing shame on her past (and this is a thing far more grievous than death), must judge the matter in her heart, and if she is pure, plead her cause with good courage, but if her conscience convicts her, make her submission and use her ashamedness to palliate her sins. For shamelessness carried to the end is the culmination of wickedness.
נ״ה
55[55] But if the statements of the two are inconclusive, and do not turn the scale to either side, let them go to the temple and let the man standing opposite the altar, in the presence of the priest officiating on that day, explain his suspicion. At the same time he should bring barley-meal, as a kind of sacrifice on behalf of the woman, to shew that the accusation is not made in wanton spite, but with honest intentions and is founded on reasonable doubt.
נ״ו
56[56] The priest taking the offering hands it to the woman and removes her kerchief, in order that she may be judged with her head bared and stripped of the symbol of modesty, regularly worn by women who are wholly innocent. But there must be no oil nor frankincense, as in the other sacrifices, because the intention of the sacrifice to be performed on this occasion is not joyful but exceedingly painful.
נ״ז
57[57] The meal used is of barley, perhaps because as a foodstuff it is of somewhat doubtful merit, suited for irrational animals and men in unhappy circumstances, and thus is a symbol that the adulteress is quite on a par with wild beasts, which copulate without discrimination or due consideration, while the wife who is innocent of the charges brought against her has emulated the life which is fitted to human beings.
נ״ח
58[58] The priest, it continues, will take an earthen vessel, pour into it pure water which he has drawn from a spring, and put in a clod of earth got from the ground on which the temple stands. These likewise, I consider, refer symbolically to the quest for the truth. The act of adultery is signified by the earthen vessel because of its fragility, since death is the punishment decreed for adulterers; innocence of the charge by the earth and water, since both these are factors in the birth and growth and consummation of all things.
נ״ט
59[59] And therefore the terms used in both cases make an appropriate addition to the picture. The water, it says, must be taken “pure” and “living,” since if the woman is guiltless her conduct is “pure” and she deserves to “live”; the earth is taken not from any chance place but from the “holy” ground, which must needs be capable of fertility, as also must the chaste wife.
ס׳
60[60] When these preliminaries are completed, the woman is to come forward with her head uncovered, bringing the barley-meal, as has been said, and the priest holding the earthen vessel with the earth and water in it stands fronting her and pronounces as follows:
ס״א
61[61] “If thou hast not transgressed the lawful usages of marriage, if no other man has had intercourse with thee, suffered by thee in abandonment of thy duties to the legitimate partner of thy home, be clear of guilt and its consequences. But if thou hast set at naught thy husband and eagerly gratified thy new desires, seized with love for another or surrendering to his love, betraying and debasing the closest and fondest ties, be well assured that thou hast laid thyself open to every curse, and the signs of their fulfilment thou wilt exhibit in thy body. Come then, drink the draught of testing which will uncover and lay bare what is now hidden in secrecy.”
ס״ב
62[62] He will then write these words on a piece of paper and after blotting them out in the water in the vessel, proffer it to the woman, and when she has drunk she will depart expecting either reward for her chastity or extreme punishment for her incontinence. For if she has been falsely accused she may hope to conceive and bear children and pay no heed to her fears and apprehensions of sterility or childlessness. But if she is guilty she may be sure that the fate awaiting her is an unwieldy belly, swollen and inflamed, and terrible suffering all round the womb, which she has not cared to keep pure for the husband who married her according to ancestral custom.
ס״ג
63[63] So careful is the law to provide against the introduction of violent changes in the institution of marriage that a husband and wife, who have intercourse in accordance with the legitimate usages of married life, are not allowed, when they leave their bed, to touch anything until they have made their ablutions and purged themselves with water. This ordinance extends by implication to a prohibition of adultery, or anything which entails an accusation of adultery.
ס״ד
64[64] If anyone dishonours by violence a woman widowed by the death of her husband or through any other form of separation, the crime he commits is less serious than in adultery, of which it may be said to be the half. The penalty of death should not be enforced in his case: but since he has accepted as highly honourable such vile things as violence, outrage, incontinence and effrontery, he must be indicted and the court must determine for him the penalty he should suffer or the compensation he should pay.
ס״ה
65[65] The corruption of a maiden is a criminal offence closely akin to adultery, its brother in fact, for both spring as it were from one mother, licentiousness, to which some whose way it is to bedizen ugly things with specious terms, ashamed to admit its true nature, give the name of love. Still the kinship does not amount to complete similarity, because the wrong caused by the corruption is not passed on to several families as it is with adultery, but is concentrated in one, that of the maiden herself.
ס״ו
66[66] Our advice then to one who desires a damsel of gentle birth should be this: “My good sir, have nothing to do with reckless and shameless effrontery or treacherous snares, or anything of the kind, and do not either openly or secretly prove yourself a rascal.
ס״ז
67[67] But if you have, heart and soul, centred your affections on the girl, go to her parents, if they are alive, or, if not, to her brothers or guardians or others who have charge of her, lay bare before them the state of your affections, as a free man should, ask her hand in marriage and plead that you may not be thought unworthy of her.
ס״ח
68[68] For none of those who have had the care of the girl would behave so stupidly as to set himself in opposition to the increasing earnestness of your entreaties, particularly if, on examination, he finds that your affections are not counterfeited nor superficial, but are genuine and firmly established.”
ס״ט
69[69] But if anyone in furious frenzy will have nothing to say to the suggestions of reason, but regarding wild passion and lust as sovereign powers and giving the place of honour to violence above law, as the saying goes, turns to rapine and ravishment and treats free women as though they were servant-maids, acting in peace as he might in war-time, he must be brought before the judges.
ע׳
70[70] And if the victim of the violation has a father he must consider the question of espousing her to the author of her ruin. If he refuses, the seducer must give a dowry to the girl, his punishment being thus limited to a monetary fine, but if the father consents to the union, he must marry her without any delay and agree to give the same dowry as in the former case, and he must not be at liberty to draw back, or to make difficulties. This is in the interest both of himself, to make the rape appear due to legitimate love rather than to lasciviousness, and of the girl, to give her for the misfortune, which she has suffered at their first association, the consolation of a wedlock so firmly established that nothing but death will undo it.
ע״א
71[71] If she has lost her father, she must be asked by the judges whether she wishes to consort with the man or not. And whether she agrees or refuses, the terms agreed upon must be the same as they would have been if her father were alive.
ע״ב
72[72] Some consider that midway between the corruption of a maiden and adultery stands the crime committed on the eve of marriage, when mutual agreements have affianced the parties beyond all doubt, but before the marriage was celebrated, another man, either by seduction or violence, has intercourse with the bride. But this too, to my thinking, is a form of adultery. For the agreements, being documents containing the names of the man and woman, and the other particulars needed for wedlock, are equivalent to marriage.
ע״ג
73[73] And therefore the law ordains that both should be stoned to death, if, that is, they set about their misdeeds by mutual agreement with one and the same purpose. For if they were not actuated by the same purpose, they cannot be regarded as fellow-criminals, where there was no such fellowship.
ע״ד
74[74] Thus we find that difference of situation makes the criminality greater or less. Naturally it is greater if the act is committed in the city and less if it is committed outside the walls and in a solitude. For here there is no one to help the girl, though she says and does everything possible to keep her virginity intact and invulnerable, while in the town there are council-chambers and law-courts, crowds of controllers of districts, markets and wards, and other persons in authority and with them the common people.
ע״ה
75[75] For assuredly there is in the soul of every man, however undistinguished he may be, a detestation of evil, and if this emotion is roused, no outside influence is then needed to turn its possessor into a champion ready to do battle for anyone who to all appearance has been wronged.
ע״ו
76[76] As for the man who perpetrated the violation, justice pursues him everywhere, and difference of situation lends him no help to make good his outrageous and lawless conduct. It is not so with the girl. In the one case pity and forgiveness attend her, as I have said, in the other inexorable punishment.
ע״ז
77[77] And indeed her position demands careful inquiry from the judge who must not make everything turn upon the scene of the act. For she may have been forced against her will in the heart of the city, and she may have surrendered voluntarily to unlawful embraces outside the city. And therefore the law in defending the case of a woman deflowered in a solitude is careful to add the very excellent proviso: “The damsel cried out and there was none to help her;” so that if she neither cried out nor resisted but co-operated willingly, she will be found guilty, and her use of the place as an excuse is merely a device to make it seem that she was forced.
ע״ח
78[78] Again what help would be available in the city to one who was willing to use all possible means to protect her personal honour, but was unable to do so because of the strength which the ravisher could bring to bear? If he should bind her with the help of others and gag her mouth so that she could not utter a sound, what help could she get from the neighbours? In a sense such a one, though living in a city, is in a solitude, being solitary so far as helpers are concerned. The other, even if no one was present to help, may be said, in view of her willing cooperation, to be in exactly the same position as the offender in the town.
ע״ט
79[79] There are some persons who show fickleness in their relations to women, mad for them and loathing them at the same time, each of them a mass of chaotic and promiscuous characteristics. They give way in a moment to their first impulses of any and every kind and let them go unbridled instead of reining them in as they should. They run about wildly and violently, pushing about and upsetting everything material or immaterial, with the result that like blind men without eyes to see before or around they tumble over them and suffer in the same measure as they have meted.
פ׳
80[80] For these people the law lays down as follows: In the case of persons who take maidens in lawful matrimony and have celebrated the bridal sacrifices and feasts, but retain no conjugal affection for their wives, and insult and treat these gentlewomen as if they were harlots—if such persons scheme to effect a separation, but finding no pretext for divorce resort to false accusation and through lack of matters of open daylight shift the charges to secret intimacies and bring forward an incriminating statement that the virgins whom they supposed they had married were discovered by them, when they first came together, to have lost their virginity already—then the whole body of elders will assemble to try the matter and the parents will appear to plead the cause in which all are endangered.
פ״א
81[81] For the danger affects not only the daughters whose bodily chastity is impugned, but also their guardians, against whom the charge is brought not only that they failed to watch over them at the most critical period of adolescence, but that the brides they had given as virgins had been dishonoured by other men, and thereby the bride-grooms were cheated and deceived.
פ״ב
82[82] Then, if the justice of their cause prevails, the judges must assess the punishments due to these concoctors of false charges. This will consist of monetary fines, bodily degradation in the form of stripes, and what is most distasteful of all to the culprits, confirmation of the marriage, if, that is, the women can bring themselves to consort with such persons. For the law permits the wives to stay or separate as they wish, but deprives the husbands of any choice either way, as a punishment for their slanderous accusations.
פ״ג
83[83] The term murder or manslaughter is used to signify the act of one who has killed a human being, but in real truth that act is a sacrilege, and the worst of sacrileges; seeing that of all the treasures which the universe has in its store there is none more sacred and godlike than man, the glorious cast of a glorious image, shaped according to the pattern of the archetypal form of the Word.
פ״ד
84[84] It follows necessarily that the murderer must be regarded as an offender against piety and holiness, both of which are violated in the highest degree by his action. For his merciless conduct he must be put to death, though indeed it is a thousand deaths that he deserves instead of the one which he suffers, because his punishment being necessarily single cannot grow into a plurality in which death has no place. And there is no hardship if he suffers the same as he has done;
פ״ה
85[85] and yet how can it be called the same when the times, the actions, the motives and the persons are different? Is it not the fact that the unprovoked wrong comes earlier and the punishment for it later; that murder is entirely lawless and the punishment for murder entirely lawful; that the slayer has satisfied his desire with the blood which he purposed to shed while his victim, being removed from the scene, can neither retaliate nor feel the pleasure which retaliation gives; that the former can work his will single-handed and as sole agent, while to the latter any counter-stroke is only possible if his friends and kinsmen in pity for his misfortune make his cause their own?
פ״ו
86[86] If anyone threatens the life of another with a sword, even though he does not actually kill him, he must be held guilty of murder in intention, although the fulfilment has not kept pace with the purpose. The same should be the lot of anyone who craftily lies in wait, and, though not daring to attack outright, plots and schemes to shed blood treacherously, for he too is under the curse in his soul at least even though his hands are innocent as yet.
פ״ז
87[87] For just as not only those who fight battles by sea or land, but also those who have made preparations for either and planted their engines to command our harbours and walls are judged by us to be our enemies, even though there is no engagement as yet, so too in my opinion should we regard as murderers, not merely those who have slain but also those whose every action aims at destroying life either openly or secretly, even though they have not carried out the crime.
פ״ח
88[88] And if through cowardice or effrontery, two antagonistic but equally culpable emotions, they venture to take refuge in the temple, hoping to obtain an asylum there, they must be prevented from entering; and if they manage to slink in, they must be handed over for execution with a declaration to the effect that the holy place does not provide asylum for the unholy. Everyone whose actions are irremediable is an enemy of God, and the actions of murderers are irremediable, as are also the calamities which the murdered have sustained.
פ״ט
89[89] If those who have committed no sin are forbidden access to the sanctuary, until they have bathed and purged themselves with purifying water according to the customary rites, is it fitting that the sacred building should be the resort and abode of men labouring under the curse of ineffaceable crimes, the pollution of which no length of time will wash away—men who would not be admitted into the dwelling-houses of decent people who take any thought for what the law of holiness permits or forbids?
צ׳
90[90] So as they have added crimes to crimes and capped murder with defiance of the law and impiety, these malefactors whose deeds, as I have said, deserve not one but a thousand deaths must be carried off to pay the penalty.
צ״א
91Another consideration is that the temple will remain closed ground to the friends and kinsmen of the victim of treachery, if the murderer makes it his abode, since they would never bring themselves to come under the same roof as he. And it would be preposterous that a single person, a transgressor of the worst kind, should cause the banishment of the many sufferers from his transgression, who not only have committed no sin but have sustained a sad and untimely bereavement.
צ״ב
92[91] It may well be also that Moses, who in the keenness of his mental vision could look into the distant future, took steps to provide that the visits of the slain man’s relatives should not lead to bloodshed in the temple. For family affection is an emotion which cannot be kept in bondage, and as with persons possessed by fanaticism it will incite them to slay him almost on the spur of the moment, and the result of this will be a profanation of the gravest sort. For the blood of the murderer will mix with the blood of the sacrifices, the impure with the consecrated. These are the reasons why he ordered the murderer to be handed over from the altar itself.
צ״ג
93[92] But those who take another’s life with swords or spears or javelins or staves or stones or anything else of the kind may not act on premeditation ; they may not have long pondered the abomination in their hearts; they may have been moved by a momentary instinct and allowed their anger to overpower their reason when they did the fatal deed. If so, theirs is but a half action, since the mind has not been under the control of the polluting influences from some far earlier time.
צ״ד
94[93] But there are others, the worst of villains, accursed both in hand and will, the sorcerers and poisoners, who provide themselves with leisure and retirement to prepare the onslaughts they will make when the right time comes, and think out multiform schemes and devices to harm their neighbours.
צ״ה
95[94] And therefore he orders that poisoners, male or female, should not survive for a day or even an hour, but perish as soon as they are detected, since no reason can be given for delay or for postponing their punishment. Hostile intentions if undisguised can be guarded against, but those who secretly frame and concoct their plans of attack with the aid of poisons employ artifices which cannot easily be observed.
צ״ו
96[95] The only course, then, is to anticipate them by meting to the actors the treatment which others may expect to suffer through their acts. For apart from other considerations the slayer who openly uses a sword or any similar weapon will make away with a few on one particular occasion, but if he mixes an injection of deadly poison with some articles of food his victims who have no foreknowledge of the plot will be counted by thousands.
צ״ז
97[96] We have certainly heard of banquets where sudden destruction has fallen upon a great assemblage of guests drawn by comradeship to eat of the same salt and sit at the same board, to whom the cup of peace has brought the bitterness of war and festivity has been changed into death. And therefore it is right that even the most reasonable and mild-tempered should seek the blood of such as these, that they should lose hardly a moment in becoming their executioners, and should hold it a religious duty to keep their punishment in their own hands and not commit it to others.
צ״ח
98[97] For surely it is a horror of horrors to manufacture out of the food which is the source of life an instrument of death, and to work a destructive change in the natural means of sustenance, so that when the compulsion of nature sends them to take food and drink they do not see the pitfall that lies before them and put to their lips what will annihilate the existence which they think it will preserve.
צ״ט
99[98] The same punishment must be suffered by any who, although the compounds which they make are not deadly, purvey what will set up chronic diseases. For death in many cases is preferable to diseases, particularly such as drag on through long periods of time without any favourable termination. For maladies caused by poisoning have been found difficult to cure and sometimes entirely unamenable to treatment.
ק׳
100[99] However, the bodily troubles of the sufferers from these machinations are often less grievous than those which affect their souls. Fits of delirium and insanity and intolerable frenzy swoop down upon them, and thereby the mind, the greatest gift which God has assigned to human kind, is subject to every sort of affliction, and when it despairs of salvation it takes its departure and makes its home elsewhere, leaving in the body the baser kind of soul, the irrational, which the beasts also share. For everyone who is left forsaken by reason, the better part of the soul, has been transformed into the nature of a beast, even though the outward characteristics of his body still retain their human form.
ק״א
101[100] Now the true magic, the scientific vision by which the facts of nature are presented in a clearer light, is felt to be a fit object for reverence and ambition and is carefully studied not only by ordinary persons but by kings and the greatest kings, and particularly those of the Persians, so much so that it is said that no one in that country is promoted to the throne unless he has first been admitted into the caste of the Magi.
ק״ב
102[101] But there is a counterfeit of this, most properly called a perversion of art, pursued by charlatan mendicants and parasites and the basest of the women and slave population, who make it their profession to deal in purifications and disenchantments and promise with some sort of charms and incantations to turn men’s love into deadly enmity and their hatred into profound affection. The simplest and most innocent natures are deceived by the bait till at last the worst misfortunes come upon them and thereby the wide membership which unites great companies of friends and kinsmen falls gradually into decay and is rapidly and silently destroyed.
ק״ג
103[102] All these things our lawgiver had in view, I believe, when he prohibited any postponement in bringing poisoners to justice and ordained that the punishment should be exacted at once. For postponement encourages the culprits to use the little time they have to live as an opportunity for repeating their crimes, while it fills those who already have misgivings as to their safety with a still more horrifying fear, as they think that the survival of the poisoners means death to themselves.
ק״ד
104[103] So just as the mere sight of vipers and scorpions and all venomous creatures even before they sting or wound or attack us at all leads us to kill them without delay as a precaution against injury necessitated by their inherited viciousness, in the same way it is right to punish human beings who though they have received a nature mellowed through the possession of a rational soul, whence springs the sense of fellowship, have been so changed by their habits of life that they shew the savageness of ferocious wild beasts and find their only source of pleasure and profit in injuring all whom they can.
ק״ה
105[104] Enough has been said for the present on the subject of poisoners, but we must not fail to observe that occasions often arise unsought in which a man commits murder without having come with this purpose in his mind or with any preparations, but has been carried away by anger, that intractable and malignant passion so highly injurious both to him who entertains it and to him against whom it is directed.
ק״ו
106[105] Sometimes a man goes to the market-place through stress of business; he meets another of the more headstrong kind who sets about abusing or striking him, or it may be that he himself begins the quarrel; then when they have set to, he wishes to break off and escape quickly; he smites the other with his clenched fist or takes up a stone and throws it.
ק״ז
107[106] Suppose that the blow strikes home, then if his opponent dies at once, the striker too must die and be treated as he has treated the other, but if that other is not killed on the spot by the blow, but is laid up with sickness and after keeping his bed and receiving the proper care gets up again and goes abroad, even though he is not sound on his feet and can only walk with the support of others or leaning on a staff, the striker must be fined twice over, first to make good the other’s enforced idleness and secondly to compensate for the cost of his cure.
ק״ח
108[107] This payment will release him from the death-penalty, even if the sufferer from the blow subsequently dies. For as he got better and walked abroad, his death may be due not to the blow but to other causes which often suddenly attack and put an end to persons whose bodily health is as sound as possible.
ק״ט
109[108] If a man comes to blows with a pregnant woman and strikes her on the belly and she miscarries, then, if the result of the miscarriage is unshaped and undeveloped, he must be fined both for the outrage and for obstructing the artist Nature in her creative work of bringing into life the fairest of living creatures, man. But, if the offspring is already shaped and all the limbs have their proper qualities and places in the system,
ק״י
110[109] he must die, for that which answers to this description is a human being, which he has destroyed in the laboratory of Nature who judges that the hour has not yet come for bringing it out into the light, like a statue lying in a studio requiring nothing more than to be conveyed outside and released from confinement.
קי״א
111[110] This ordinance carries with it the prohibition of something else more important, the exposure of infants, a sacrilegious practice which among many other nations, through their ingrained inhumanity, has come to be regarded with complacence.
קי״ב
112[111] For if on behalf of the child not yet brought to the birth by the appointed conclusion of the regular period thought has to be taken to save it from disaster at the hands of the evil-minded, surely still more true is this of the full-born babe sent out as it were to settle in the new homeland assigned to mankind, there to partake of the gifts of Nature. These gifts she draws from earth and water and air and heaven. Of heavenly things she grants the contemplation, of earthly things the sovereignty and dominion. She bestows in abundance on all the senses what every element contains, on the mind, as on a mighty king, through the senses as its squires, all that they perceive, without them all that reason apprehends.
קי״ג
113[112] If the guardians of the children cut them off from these blessings, if at their very birth they deny them all share in them, they must rest assured that they are breaking the laws of Nature and stand self-condemned on the gravest charges, love of pleasure, hatred of men, murder and, the worst abomination of all, murder of their own children.
קי״ד
114[113] For they are pleasure-lovers when they mate with their wives, not to procreate children and perpetuate the race, but like pigs and goats in quest of the enjoyment which such intercourse gives. Men-haters too, for who could more deserve the name than these enemies, these merciless foes of their offspring? For no one is so foolish as to suppose that those who have treated dishonourably their own flesh and blood will deal honourably with strangers.
קי״ה
115[114] As to the charges of murder in general and murder of their own children in particular the clearest proofs of their truth is supplied by the parents. Some of them do the deed with their own hands; with monstrous cruelty and barbarity they stifle and throttle the first breath which the infants draw or throw them into a river or into the depths of the sea, after attaching some heavy substance to make them sink more quickly under its weight.
קי״ו
116[115] Others take them to be exposed in some desert place, hoping, they themselves say, that they may be saved, but leaving them in actual truth to suffer the most distressing fate. For all the beasts that feed on human flesh visit the spot and feast unhindered on the infants, a fine banquet provided by their sole guardians, those who above all others should keep them safe, their fathers and mothers. Carnivorous birds, too, come flying down and gobble up the fragments, that is, if they have not discovered them earlier, for, if they have, they get ready to fight the beasts of the field for the whole carcase.
קי״ז
117[116] But suppose some passing travellers, stirred by humane feeling, take pity and compassion on the castaways and in consequence raise them up, give them food and drink, and do not shrink from paying all the other attentions which they need, what do we think of such highly charitable actions? Do we not consider that those who brought them into the world stand condemned when strangers play the part of parents, and parents do not behave with even the kindness of strangers?
קי״ח
118[117] So Moses then, as I have said, implicitly and indirectly forbade the exposure of children, when he pronounced the sentence of death against those who cause the miscarriage of mothers in cases where the foetus is fully formed. No doubt the view that the child while still adhering to the womb below the belly is part of its future mother is current both among natural philosophers whose life study is concerned with the theoretical side of knowledge and also among physicians of the highest repute, who have made researches into the construction of man and examined in detail what is visible and also by the careful use of anatomy what is hidden from sight, in order that if medical treatment is required nothing which could cause serious danger should be neglected through ignorance.
קי״ט
119[118] But when the child has been brought to the birth it is separated from the organism with which it was identified and being isolated and self-contained becomes a living animal, lacking none of the complements needed to make a human being. And therefore infanticide undoubtedly is murder, since the displeasure of the law is not concerned with ages but with a breach of faith to the race.
ק״כ
120[119] Though indeed, if age had to be taken into consideration, infanticide to my mind gives a greater cause for indignation, for in the case of adults quarrels and differences supply any number of reasonable pretexts, but with mere babes, who have just passed into the light and the life of human kind, not even a false charge can be brought against such absolute innocence. Therefore those who gird themselves up to conspire against such as these must be judged to be the cruellest and most ruthless of men. The holy law detests them and has pronounced them worthy of punishment.
קכ״א
121[120] The holy law describes the man who has been slain without the deliberate intention of him who did the deed as having been delivered by God into the manslayer’s hands. In this phrase it is partly defending one who has admittedly taken the life of another on the ground that it was the life of a guilty person.
קכ״ב
122[121] For it assumes that a merciful and forgiving God would never surrender an innocent man to be done to death but only one who having been enabled by his resourcefulness to make a skilful escape from the justice of men has been arraigned and condemned in the invisible court of Nature, that court in which truth is seen in perfect purity, which is not beclouded by verbal artifices, since it never accepts words at all but unveils motives and brings hidden intentions into open daylight. Partly, too, it lays the manslayer under the imputation, not indeed of murder, since he is held to have been the minister of divine judgement, but of a defilement of little note and quite insignificant, for which pardon may well be asked and granted.
קכ״ג
123[122] For in inflicting chastisement on offenders whose deeds have been evil beyond all remedy God uses as His ministers those whose sins are few and easily remedied, though He does not show approval of them but merely takes them as suitable instruments of vengeance. For He would not wish that anyone whose whole life is stainless and his lineage also should set his hand to homicide however justly deserved.
קכ״ד
124[123] He therefore sentenced the involuntary manslayer to go into exile, but not just anywhere nor yet for all time. For He assigned to persons convicted under this head six cities, an eighth part of those allotted to the consecrated tribe, a fact recorded in the name of “cities of refuge” which He gave to them, and by a further edict He limited the time of banishment to the life of the high priest, after whose death the exile should be permitted to return.
קכ״ה
125[124] The first reason for this is as follows: the aforesaid tribe received the cities as a reward for a righteous slaughter which we must regard as the most illustrious act of heroism that has ever been achieved.
קכ״ו
126[125] When the prophet, summoned up to the highest and most sacred mountain in that region, was receiving from God the heads which sum up the particular laws, and had disappeared for several days, the born enemies of peace had diffused through every part of the camp the vices that spring up in the ruler’s absence and had crowned them with impiety. They mocked at the most excellent and admirable injunctions which bade them honour the truly existing God, constructed a golden bull in imitation of the vanity of Egypt, offered sacrifices which were no sacrifices, held feasts which were no feasts and danced dances of death with songs and hymns which should have been dirges.
קכ״ז
127[126] Then this same tribe, sorely distressed at the sudden backsliding and fired with zeal by their heart-felt hatred of evil, every man of them filled with rage, frenzied, possessed, took arms as if at one signal, and despising all thoughts of danger mowed down their foes drunk with the twofold intoxication of impiety and wine. They began with their nearest and dearest, for they acknowledged no love nor kinship but God’s love, and in the space of a few hours 24,000 had fallen whose fate served as a warning through fear that they might suffer the like to those who were on the brink of sharing their delusion.
קכ״ח
128[127] This campaign, waged spontaneously and instinctively on behalf of piety and holiness towards the truly existing God and fraught with much danger to those who undertook it, was approved by none other than the Father of all Who took it upon Himself to judge the cause of those who wrought the slaughter, declared them pure from any curse of bloodguiltiness and gave them the priesthood as a reward for their gallantry.
קכ״ט
129[128] So then he bids the unintentional homicide flee to some of the cities allotted to this tribe, there to gain consolation and be saved from despairing of salvation altogether. There the place will remind him of the fearless courage once shewn in the past; there he may reflect that those who shed blood intentionally received not only full pardon but also rewards great and much to be desired and fraught with abundant happiness; and that, if they fared thus, much more will those whose act was not premeditated receive, not indeed such privileges as confer honour, but at least the lowest and last that they do not pay for the blood they have shed with their own. This shews that not every kind of homicide is culpable but only that which entails injustice, and that as for the other kinds if it is caused by an ardent yearning for virtue it is laudable and if unintentional it is free from blame.
ק״ל
130[129] No more need be said about the first reason; we must proceed at once to explain the second. The law wishes to preserve the unintentional homicide, as it recognizes that in intention he was free from guilt, and that with his hands he had been the servant of justice, the overseer of human affairs. It knows that watching and waiting for him are blood-thirsty enemies, the kinsmen of the dead man, urged on to vengeance by overwhelming pity and inconsolable grief, and so carried away by unreasoning passion that they do not inquire what is true or essentially just.
קל״א
131[130] It therefore permitted such a one to fly for refuge, not to the holy temple, since he had not yet been purged, nor yet to some obscure and insignificant place where he might easily be surrendered as one of little account, but to a holy city which comes midway between holy and profane ground and is in a sense a secondary temple. For the cities of the consecrated order compared with the others receive a higher reverence, corresponding, I consider, to the honour paid to their respective occupants. The law wished in fact to use the superior rank of the city which gave them shelter to put the safety of the fugitive on the firmest possible footing.
קל״ב
132[131] When, as I said, it appointed the death of the high priest as the date for the exile’s return, it did so for some such reason as this. Just as each single individual who is wilfully murdered has kinsmen to inflict vengeance on the murderer, so too the whole nation has a kinsman and close relative common to all in the high priest, who as ruler dispenses justice to litigants according to the law, who day by day offers prayers and sacrifices and asks for blessings, as for his brothers and parents and children, that every age and every part of the nation regarded as a single body may be united in one and the same fellowship, making peace and good order their aim.
קל״ג
133[132] Everyone, then, who has slain another unintentionally must fear the high priest as a champion and defender of the slain and keep himself shut up within the city in which he has taken refuge, never venturing to shew himself outside the walls, that is, if he sets any value on his safety, or on a life secure from danger.
קל״ד
134[133] When, then, he says that the exile must not return till the death of the high priest, it is as much as to say till the death of the common kinsman of all, who alone has authority to arbitrate on the rights both of the living and the dead.
קל״ה
135[134] Such is the reason which we find suitable to younger ears, but for elders and those whose character is fully developed there is another which may properly be given. For laymen it may be allowed that it is enough to keep undefiled from voluntary misdeeds only, and anyone who likes may say the same of the other priests, but he must make an exception of the high priest and agree that he needs to be innocent of the involuntary as well as the voluntary.
קל״ו
136[135] The contact with pollution of any kind is forbidden to him, whether it is the result of definite purpose or of some movement of the soul which he has not willed, for only so can he take his place as revealer in both aspects, his motives blameless and his life so fortunate that no stigma attaches to it.
קל״ז
137[136] It is a necessary consequence that such a one should include in the objects of his displeasure the unintentional homicides, regarding them not indeed as accursed, but yet not pure or free from sin of every kind, however much they are admitted to have ministered to Nature’s will, who has used them as instruments of vengeance against those who have fallen by their hands, condemned to death in the secret tribunal where she sits as sole judge.
קל״ח
138What has been said applies to free-born persons of citizen rank; the enactments which follow deal with slaves whose death is caused by violence.
קל״ט
139[137] Servants rank lower in fortune but in nature can claim equality with their masters, and in the law of God the standard of justice is adjusted to nature and not to fortune. And therefore the masters should not make excessive use of their authority over slaves by showing arrogance and contempt and savage cruelty. For these are signs of no peaceful spirit, but of one so intemperate as to seek to throw off all responsibility and take the tyrant’s despotism for its model.
ק״מ
140[138] He who has used his private house as a sort of stronghold of defiance and allows no freedom of speech to any of the inmates, but treats all with the brutality created by his native or perhaps acquired hatred for his fellow-men, is a tyrant with smaller resources.
קמ״א
141[139] By his use of them he gives proof that he will not stay where he is, if he gets more wealth into his hands, for he will pass on at once to attack cities and countries and nations, after first reducing his own fatherland to slavery, a sign that he will not deal gently with any of his other subjects.
קמ״ב
142[140] Such a one must clearly understand that his misconduct cannot be prolonged or widely extended with immunity, for he will have for his adversary justice, the hater of evil, the defender and champion of the ill-used, who will call upon him to give an account for the unhappy condition of the sufferers.
קמ״ג
143[141] And if he alleges that the stripes he inflicted were meant as a deterrent and not with the intention of causing death, he shall not at once depart with a cheerful heart, but will be brought before the court, there to be examined under strict investigators of the truth as to whether he meant to commit homicide or not; and if he is found to have acted with intentional wickedness and with malice aforethought he must die, and his position as master will avail him nothing to escape the sentence.
קמ״ד
144[142] But if the sufferers do not die on the spot under the lash but survive for one or perhaps two days, the situation is different and the master is not to be held guilty of murder. In this case he is provided with a valuable plea, namely that he did not beat them to death at the time nor yet later when he had them in his house, but suffered them to live as long as they could, even though that was quite a short time. Furthermore he may argue that no one is so foolish as to try to harm another when he himself will be wronged thereby.
קמ״ה
145[143] And it is true that anyone who kills a slave injures himself far more, as he deprives himself of the service which he receives from him when alive and loses his value as a piece of property, which may be possibly very considerable. When the slave has committed some act worthy of death his master should bring him before the judges and state the offence, thus leaving the decision of the penalty with the laws instead of keeping it in his own hands.
קמ״ו
146[144] If a bull gores a man and kills him, it must be stoned, since it is not fit to be slaughtered as a sacrifice, and its flesh must not be eaten. Why is this? It is required by the law of holiness that the flesh of an animal that has killed a man should not be used as a foodstuff for men or to make their food more palatable.
קמ״ז
147[145] If the owner of the animal knowing that it is savage and wild has not tied it up nor kept it shut up under guard, or if he has had information from others that it is unmanageable, he must be held guilty as responsible for the death by allowing it to range at large. And while the aggressive animal is to be put to death at once, the owner must also forfeit his life or else redeem it by a ransom, what punishment he must suffer or what compensation he must pay being left to the decision of the court. If, however, it is a slave who is killed, he must make good his value to the owner and if it has gored not a man but one of the live-stock,
קמ״ח
148[146] here too the owner of the beast which has caused its death must pay like for like, taking the dead animal for his own, and be thankful that as the original cause of the wanton mischief he does not suffer a greater loss.
קמ״ט
149[147] It is a common practice with some people to dig deep holes in the ground either when they are opening veins of spring water or making receptacles for the rain water. Then after widening the tunnels out of sight, instead of walling the mouths in or covering them up with a lid as they should, through some fatal carelessness or mental aberration they leave them gaping as a death-trap.
ק״נ
150[148] If, then, some person walking along does not notice them in time but steps on a void and falls down and is killed, anyone who wishes may bring an indictment on behalf of the dead man against the makers of the pit, and the court must assess what punishment they must suffer or what compensation they must pay. But if anyone of the cattle falls down and is killed, they must make good to the owners the value of the animal as if it were alive and keep the dead body for themselves.
קנ״א
151[149] Of the same family as the above is the offence committed by those who in building their houses leave their roofs flat instead of ringing them in with parapets to prevent anyone being precipitated unawares over the edge. Indeed they are to the best of their ability murderers, even if no one is killed by the force of the fall. They must receive the same penalty as those who leave the mouths of their pits wide open.
קנ״ב
152[150] The law forbids the acceptance of ransom-money from a murderer deserving of death, in order to mitigate his punishment or substitute banishment for death, for blood is purged with blood, the blood of the wilfully murdered with the blood of the slayer.
קנ״ג
153[151] Since there are no bounds to the iniquities of evil natures, and they are ever committing a superabundance of enormities and extending and exalting their vices beyond all measure and all limit, the lawgiver would, if he could, have sentenced them to die times beyond number. But since this was impossible he ordained another penalty as an addition, and ordered the manslayers to be crucified.
קנ״ד
154[152] Yet after giving this injunction he hastened to revert to his natural humanity and shews mercy to those whose deeds were merciless when he says “Let not the sun go down upon the crucified but let them be buried in the earth before sundown.” For while it was necessary that the enemies of every part of the universe should after punishment be set on high and exhibited to the sun and heaven and air and water and earth, it was equally necessary that they should be thrust down into the place of the dead and there entombed, that nothing above the earth might be polluted by them.
קנ״ה
155[153] Another excellent ordinance is that fathers should not die for their sons nor sons for their parents, but each person who has committed deeds worthy of death should suffer it alone and in his own person. This order has in view those who either set violence before justice or are strongly influenced by family affection.
קנ״ו
156[154] These last in their excessive and overwhelming devotion will often be willing and glad to sacrifice their guiltless selves for the guilty and die in their stead. They count it a great gain to be spared from seeing, parents their children and sons their parents, undergoing a punishment which they feel will make their after-life intolerable and more painful than any death.
קנ״ז
157[155] To these we should answer “your devotion is mistimed and the mistimed deserves censure just as the rightly timed deserves praise. It is right indeed to shew friendship to those whose actions are worthy of friendship, but no evil-doer is a true friend. Those whom we call our kinsfolk or within the circle of kinsmen our friends are turned into aliens by their misconduct when they go astray; for agreement to practise justice and every virtue makes a closer kinship than that of blood, and he who abandons this enters his name in the list not only of strangers and foreigners but of mortal enemies.
קנ״ח
158[156] Why, then, under the false name of devotion do you assume to be all that is kind and humane and cloak the realities, your weakness and unmanliness? For unmanly is the nature you shew in letting compassion overcome your reason, only to commit a double wrong in trying to deliver the guilty from chastisement and in thinking it right that you should be punished in their stead when no blame at all has been cast upon you.”
קנ״ט
159[157] Still these can plead in their defence that they seek no profit and are moved by exceeding affection for their nearest of kin, to save whom they propose cheerfully to lay down their lives.
ק״ס
160[158] But the other kind, the cruel of heart and bestial of nature, would be spurned, I need not say by all respectable people, but by any who are not thoroughly uncivilized in soul. I mean those who either secretly and craftily or boldly and openly threaten to inflict the most grievous sufferings on one set of persons in substitution for another and seek the destruction of those who have done no wrong on the pretext of their friendship or kinship, or partnership, or some similar connexion, with the culprits. And they sometimes do this without having suffered any grievous harm but merely through covetousness and rapine.
קס״א
161[159] An example of this was given a little time ago in our own district by a person who was appointed to serve as a collector of taxes. When some of his debtors whose default was clearly due to poverty took flight in fear of the fatal consequences of his vengeance, he carried off by force their womenfolk and children and parents and their other relatives and beat and subjected them to every kind of outrage and contumely in order to make them either tell him the whereabouts of the fugitive or discharge his debt themselves. As they could do neither the first for want of knowledge, nor the second because they were as penniless as the fugitive, he continued this treatment until while wringing their bodies with racks and instruments of torture he finally dispatched them by newly-invented methods of execution.
קס״ב
162[160] He filled a large basket with sand and having hung this enormous weight by ropes round their necks set them in the middle of the market-place in the open air, in order that while they themselves sank under the cruel stress of the accumulated punishments, the wind, the sun, the shame of being seen by the passers-by and the weights suspended on them, the spectators of their punishments might suffer by anticipation.
קס״ג
163[161] Some of these, whose souls saw facts more vividly than did their eyes, feeling themselves maltreated in the bodies of others, hastened to take leave of their lives with the aid of sword or poison or halter, thinking that in their evil plight it was a great piece of luck to die without suffering torture.
קס״ד
164[162] The others who had not seized the opportunity to dispatch themselves were brought out in a row, as is done in the awarding of inheritances, first those who stood in the first degrees of kinship, after them the second, then the third and so on till the last. And when there were no kinsmen left, the maltreatment was passed on to their neighbours and sometimes even to villages and cities which quickly became desolate and stripped of their inhabitants who left their homes and dispersed to places where they expected to remain unobserved.
קס״ה
165[163] Yet perhaps it is not to be wondered at if uncivilized persons who have never had a taste of humane culture, when they have to collect the revenue in obedience to imperious orders levy the annual tributes not only on property but on bodies, and even on the life when they bring their terrors to bear upon these substitutes for the proper debtors.
קס״ו
166[164] Indeed in the past the legislators themselves, who are the landmarks and standards of justice, have not shrunk from acting as such to the greatest injustice. With an eye to men’s opinions rather then to truth they have ordained that the fate of traitors and tyrants should be shared by the children in the first case and by the next five families in the second.
קס״ז
167[165] Why, one might ask? If they were companions in error let them also be companions in punishment, but if they had no association with the others, never followed the same objects, never let elation at the success of their kinsmen tempt them to a life of ease and pleasure, why should they be put to death? Is their relationship the one sole reason? Then is it birth or lawless actions which deserve punishment?
קס״ח
168[166] Probably you, most reverend lawgivers, had worthy people for relations. If they had been bad, I do not think the idea of such enactments would have entered your minds. Indeed you would have been indignant if others had proposed them, for you would have taken precautions that the man who lives in safety should not suffer ruin with those who run into danger, nor be set on a level with them in misfortune. Of the two situations one involves a danger which you would guard against and not allow another to incur: the other has nothing to fear and a sense of security often persuades people to neglect insuring the safety of the innocent.
קס״ט
169[167] So then our legislator took these things into consideration and observing the errors current among other nations regarded them with aversion as ruinous to the ideal commonwealth; persons whose conduct shewed any kind of sloth or inhumanity or vice he detested and would not ever surrender anyone whose life had been passed in their company to be punished with them and thus made an appendix to the crimes of others.
ק״ע
170[168] He therefore expressly forbade that sons should be slain instead of fathers or fathers instead of sons. Thereby also he gave it as his judgement that persons who had sinned should be the persons who were punished, whether the punishment consisted of monetary fines or stripes and injurious treatment of a still more violent kind, or wounds and maiming and disfranchisement and exile or any other kind of sentence. For in the single statement that one man should not be killed instead of another he included also the cases which he left unmentioned.
קע״א
171[169] Market-places and council-halls and law-courts and gatherings and meetings where a large number of people are assembled, and open-air life with full scope for discussion and action—all these are suitable to men both in war and peace. The women are best suited to the indoor life which never strays from the house, within which the middle door is taken by the maidens as their boundary, and the outer door by those who have reached full womanhood.
קע״ב
172[170] Organized communities are of two sorts, the greater which we call cities and the smaller which we call households. Both of these have their governors; the government of the greater is assigned to men under the name of statesmanship, that of the lesser, known as household management, to women.
קע״ג
173[171] A woman, then, should not be a busybody, meddling with matters outside her household concerns, but should seek a life of seclusion. She should not shew herself off like a vagrant in the streets before the eyes of other men, except when she has to go to the temple, and even then she should take pains to go, not when the market is full, but when most people have gone home, and so like a free-born lady worthy of the name, with everything quiet around her, make her oblations and offer her prayers to avert the evil and gain the good.
קע״ד
174[172] The audacity of women who when men are exchanging angry words or blows hasten to join in, under the pretext of assisting their husbands in the fray, is reprehensible and shameless in a high degree. And so in wars and campaigns and emergencies which threaten the whole country they are not allowed to take their place according to the judgement of the law, having in view the fitness of things, which it was resolved to keep unshaken always and everywhere and considered to be in itself more valuable than victory or liberty or success of any kind.
קע״ה
175[173] If indeed a woman learning that her husband is being outraged is overcome by the wifely feeling inspired by her love for him and forced by the stress of the emotion to hasten to his assistance, she must not unsex herself by a boldness beyond what nature permits but limit herself to the ways in which a woman can help. For it would be an awful catastrophe if any woman in her wish to rescue her husband from outrage should outrage herself by befouling her own life with the disgrace and heavy reproaches which boldness carried to an extreme entails.
קע״ו
176[174] What, is a woman to wrangle in the market-place and utter some or other of the words which decency forbids? Should she not when she hears bad language stop her ears and run away? As it is, some of them go to such a length that, not only do we hear amid a crowd of men a woman’s bitter tongue venting abuse and contumelious words, but see her hands also used to assault—hands which were trained to weave and spin and not to inflict blows and injuries like pancratiasts and boxers.
קע״ז
177[175] And while all else might be tolerable, it is a shocking thing, if a woman is so lost to a sense of modesty, as to catch hold of the genital parts of her opponent. The fact that she does so with the evident intention of helping her husband must not absolve her. To restrain her over-boldness she must pay a penalty which will incapacitate herself, if she wishes to repeat the offence, and frighten the more reckless members of her sex into proper behaviour. And the penalty shall be this—that the hand shall be cut off which has touched what decency forbids it to touch.
קע״ח
178[176] The managers of gymnastic competitions also deserve praise for debarring women from the spectacle, in order that they may not be present, when men are stripping themselves naked, nor debase the sterling coin of modesty, by disregarding the statutes of nature which she has laid down for each section of our race. For men too cannot with propriety be present when women are taking off their clothes. Each sex should turn away from seeing the nakedness of the other and so comply with what nature has willed.
קע״ט
179[177] Surely, then, if it is reprehensible for them to use their sight, their hands are far more guilty. For the eyes often take liberties and compel us to see what we do not wish to see, but the hands are ranked among the parts which we keep in subjection, and render obedient service to our orders.
ק״פ
180[178] This is the explanation commonly and widely stated, but I have heard another from highly gifted men who think that most of the contents of the law-book are outward symbols of hidden truths, expressing in words what has been left unsaid. This explanation was as follows. There is in the soul a male and female element just as there is in families, the male corresponding to the men, the female to the women. The male soul assigns itself to God alone as the Father and Maker of the Universe and the Cause of all things. The female clings to all that is born and perishes; it stretches out its faculties like a hand to catch blindly at what comes in its way, and gives the clasp of friendship to the world of created things with all its numberless changes and transmutations, instead of to the divine order, the immutable, the blessed, the thrice happy.
קפ״א
181[179] Naturally therefore we are commanded in a symbol to cut off the hand which has taken hold of the “pair,” not meaning that the body should be mutilated by the loss of a most essential member, but to bid us exscind from the soul the godless thoughts which take for their basis all that comes into being through birth; for the “pair” are a symbol of seed-sowing and birth.
קפ״ב
182[180] I will add another thought, following where the study of nature leads me. The monad is the image of the first cause, the dyad of matter passive and divisible. Therefore one who honours the dyad before the monad should not fail to know that he holds matter in higher esteem than God. It is for this reason that the law judged it right to cut off this tendency of the soul as if it were a hand, for there is no greater impiety than to ascribe to the passive element the power of the active principle.
קפ״ג
183[181] The legislators deserve censure who prescribe for malefactors punishments which do not resemble the crime, such as monetary fines for assaults, disfranchisement for wounding or maiming another, expulsion from the country and perpetual banishment for wilful murder or imprisonment for theft. For inequality and unevenness is repugnant to the commonwealth which pursues truth.
קפ״ד
184[182] Our law exhorts us to equality when it ordains that the penalties inflicted on offenders should correspond to their actions, that their property should suffer if the wrongdoing affected their neighbour’s property, and their bodies if the offence was a bodily injury, the penalty being determined according to the limb, part or sense affected, while if his malice extended to taking another’s life his own life should be the forfeit. For to tolerate a system in which the crime and the punishment do not correspond, have no common ground and belong to different categories, is to subvert rather than uphold legality.
קפ״ה
185[183] In saying this I assume that the other conditions are the same, for to strike a stranger is not the same as to strike a father nor the abuse of a ruler the same as abuse of an ordinary citizen. Unlawful actions differ according as they are committed in a profane or sacred place, or at festivals and solemn assemblies and public sacrifices as contrasted with days which have no holiday associations or are even quite inauspicious. And all other similar facts must be carefully considered with a view to making the punishment greater or less.
קפ״ו
186[184] Again he says that if anyone knocks out the eye of a manservant or maidservant he must set him or her at liberty. Why is this? Just as nature conferred the sovereignty of the body on the head when she granted it also possession of the citadel as the most suitable position for its kingly rank, conducted it thither to take command and established it on high with the whole framework from neck to foot set below it, like the pedestal under the statue, so too she has given the lordship of the senses to the eyes. Thus to them too as rulers she has assigned a dwelling right above the others in her wish to give them amongst other privileges the most conspicuous and distinguished situation.
קפ״ז
187[185] Now as for the services and benefits which the eyes render to the human race, it would take a long time to enumerate them, but one, the best, must be mentioned. Philosophy was showered down by heaven and received by the human mind, but the guide which brought the two together was sight, for sight was the first to discern the high roads which lead to the upper air.
קפ״ח
188[186] Now philosophy is the fountain of good things, all that are truly good, and he who draws from that spring deserves praise, if he does so for the acquisition and practice of virtue, but blame, if it is for knavish ends and to outwit another with sophistry. For in the first case he resembles the convivial man who makes himself and all his fellow-guests merry, in the second the drinker who swills himself with strong wine, only to play the sot and insult himself and his neighbours.
קפ״ט
189[187] Now let us describe the way in which sight acted as guide to philosophy; sight looked up to the ethereal region and beheld the sun and moon and the fixed and wandering stars, the host of heaven in all its sacred majesty, a world within a world; then their risings and settings, their ordered rhythmic marchings, their conjunctions as the appointed times recur, their eclipses, their reappearances;
ק״צ
190[188] then the waxing and waning of the moon, the courses of the sun from side to side as it passes from the south to the north and returns from the north to the south, thus producing the yearly seasons by which all things are brought to their consummation. Numberless other marvels did it behold, and after it had gazed around over earth and sea and the lower air, it made speed to shew all these things to the mind.
קצ״א
191[189] The mind, having discerned through the faculty of sight what of itself it was not able to apprehend, did not simply stop short at what it saw, but, drawn by its love of knowledge and beauty and charmed by the marvellous spectacle, came to the reasonable conclusion that all these were not brought together automatically by unreasoning forces, but by the mind of God Who is rightly called their Father and Maker; also that they are not unlimited but are bounded by the ambit of a single universe, walled in like a city by the outermost sphere of the fixed stars; also that the Father Who begat them according to the law of nature takes thought for His offspring, His providence watching over both the whole and the parts.
קצ״ב
192[190] Then it went on to inquire what is the substance of the world which we see and whether its constituents are all the same in substance or do some differ from others; what are the elements of which each particular part is composed, what are the causes which brought them into being, and what are the forces or properties which hold them together and are these forces corporeal or incorporeal.
קצ״ג
193[191] We may well ask what title we can give to research into these matters but philosophy and what more fitting name than philosopher to their investigator. For to make a study of God and the Universe embracing all that is therein, both animals and plants, and of the conceptual archetypes and also the works which they produce for sense to perceive, and of the good and evil qualities in every created thing—shews a disposition which loves to learn, loves to contemplate and is truly wisdom-loving or philosophical.
קצ״ד
194[192] This is the greatest boon which sight bestowed on human life, and I think that this pre-eminence has been awarded to it because it is more closely akin to the soul than the other senses. They are all of the same family as the mind, but, just as it is with families, the place which is closest in birth and first and highest, is held by sight.
קצ״ה
195[193] We may find many proofs of this, for who does not know that when we rejoice the eyes are bright and smiling, when we are sad they are full of anxiety and dejection, and, if the burden is magnified and presses and crushes, they break out into tears; when anger prevails they swell and their look is bloodshot and fiery; when the temper dies down it is gentle and kindly;
קצ״ו
196[194] when we are reflecting or inquiring the pupils are set and seem to share our thoughts, while in persons of little sense their silliness makes their vision roaming and restless. In general the emotions of the soul are shared by the eyes, and as it passes through its numberless phases they change with it, a natural consequence of their affinity. Indeed it seems to me that nowhere else in God’s creations is the inward and invisible so well represented by the outward and visible as reason is by sight.
קצ״ז
197[195] If, then, anyone has maliciously injured another in the best and lordliest of his senses, sight, and is proved to have struck out his eye, he must in his turn suffer the same, if the other is a free man, but not if he is a slave. Not that the offender deserves pardon or is less in the wrong, but because if the master is mutilated as a punishment the injured slave will find him worse than before. He will harbour a perpetual grudge for his misfortune and avenge himself on one whom he regards as a mortal enemy by setting him every day to tasks of an intolerable kind and beyond his powers to cope with, the oppressive weight of which will break his spirit also.
קצ״ח
198[196] The law, therefore, provided on the one hand that a master should not go unpunished for his malicious assault and on the other that the servant should not suffer further wrong in addition to the loss of his eye. It effected this by enacting that if anyone struck out his servant’s eye he should without hesitation grant him his liberty,
קצ״ט
199[197] for in this way the master will incur a double penalty; he will lose the value of the slave as well as his services, and a third affliction more severe than either of these two is that he will be forced to confer a benefit that touches his highest interest on an enemy whom he probably hoped to be able to maltreat indefinitely. The servant will receive a double solatium for his suffering; he is not only set at liberty but has escaped from a harsh and cruel master.
ר׳
200[198] A further command is that if anyone strikes out a servant’s tooth he must grant him his liberty. Why is this? Because life is precious and the means contrived by nature for the preservation of life are teeth by which the food is subjected to the processes necessary for dealing with it. Now the teeth are divided into the cutters and the grinders; the former do their part by cutting or biting the bread-stuffs and all other comestibles, whence their appropriate name of cutters, the latter by their capacity for reducing the bitten pieces into smaller particles.
ר״א
201[199] This is the reason why the Maker and Father, Whose way is to frame nothing that does not serve some purpose, did not make the teeth straight away at birth like each of the other parts. He bore in mind that they would be a superfluous burden to the infant who would be fed on milk, and would also bring serious trouble to the breasts, the fountain through which the liquid sustenance flows, as they would be galled during the suction of the milk.
ר״ב
202[200] He looked forward, therefore, to the proper time, that is, to when the infant is weaned from the breast, and brought out that supplementary growth of teeth, which He hitherto kept in storage, only when the infant would refuse to take food in the form of milk and could bear the more mature kind which requires the instruments which I have mentioned.
ר״ג
203[201] If, then, anyone gives way to insolent presumption and strikes out his servant’s tooth which ministers obediently to his most essential needs, sustenance and survival, he must set at liberty the victim of his injustice and suffer himself the loss of the services and ministries of the injured party.
ר״ד
204[202] Is a tooth then, I shall be asked, of the same value as an eye? They are both, I should reply, of the same value for the purposes for which they were made, the eye being made for what is visible, the tooth for what is edible. And if anyone cares to compare these, he will find that the eye is the noblest of the body’s members because it contemplates the heaven which is the noblest part of the universe, while the tooth is useful as the operator of what is most useful for maintaining life, namely food. Also anyone who has lost his sight is not thereby prevented from living, but one who has had his teeth struck out has only a most miserable death awaiting him.
ר״ה
205[203] So if anyone takes steps to injure his servants in this part of their bodies he must recognize that the effect of his act upon them is a famine artificially created in the midst of abundance and plenty. For what use have they for a generous supply of food if they have been robbed of the instruments needed for dealing effectively with it, lost to them through the actions of hard, cruel and merciless masters?
ר״ו
206[204] And therefore elsewhere the lawgiver forbids creditors to demand that their debtors should give their mill or upper millstone as a surety, and he adds that anyone who does so takes the life to pledge. For one who deprives another of the instruments needed to preserve existence is well on the way to murder, since his hostile intentions extend to attacking life itself.
ר״ז
207[205] So careful was the lawgiver to guard against anyone helping to bring about the death of another that he considers that even those who have touched the corpse of one who has met a natural death must remain unclean until they have been purified by aspersions and ablutions. Indeed he did not permit even the fully cleansed to enter the temple within seven days and ordered them to purge themselves on the third and seventh.
ר״ח
208[206] Further too, those who enter a house in which anyone has died are ordered not to touch anything until they have bathed themselves and also washed the clothes which they were wearing. And all the vessels and articles of furniture, and anything else that happens to be inside, practically everything is held by him to be unclean.
ר״ט
209[207] For a man’s soul is a precious thing, and when it departs to seek another home, all that will be left behind is defiled, deprived as it is of the divine image. For it is the mind of man which has the form of God, being shaped in conformity with the ideal archetype, the Word that is above all.
ר״י
210[208] Everything else too, he says, that the unclean person touches must be unclean, being defiled by its participation in the uncleanness. This pronouncement may be thought to include a more far-reaching veto, not merely stopping short with the body but extending its inquiry to matters of temperament and characteristics of soul.
רי״א
211[209] For the unjust and impious man is in the truest sense unclean. No thought of respect for things human or divine ever enters his mind. He puts everything into chaos and confusion, so inordinate are his passions and so prodigious his vices, and thus every deed to which he sets his hand is reprehensible, changing in conformity with the worthlessness of the doer. For conversely all the doings of the good are laudable, gaining merit through the virtues of the agents in accordance with the general law that the results of actions assimilate themselves to the actors.