על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר א י״אOn the Special Laws, Book I 11
א׳
1[59] The like principle is clearly maintained in the case of everything else by the most holy Moses, who loves and teaches the truth which he desires to engrave and stamp on all his disciples, dislodging and banishing false opinions to a distance from their understanding.
ב׳
2[60] Thus, knowing that the erring life of the multitude is greatly helped on its way into the wilds by the art of divination, he forbids them to use any of its forms and expels from his own commonwealth all its fawning followers, haruspices, purificators, augurs, interpreters of prodigies, incantators, and those who put their faith in sounds and voices.
ג׳
3[61] For all these are but guessing at what is plausible and probable, and the same phenomena present to them ideas which differ at different times because the things on which they are based have no natural stability nor has the understanding acquired any accurate touchstone by which the genuine can be tested and approved.
ד׳
4[62] All these pave the way for impiety. Why so? Because he who pays attention and puts confidence in them is spurning the Cause of all in his belief that they are the sole causes of good and evil and fails to perceive that the anchors on which he moors his life and its cares are utterly insecure, such as birds and wings and their flight hither and thither through the air, and grovelling reptiles which crawl out of their holes to seek their food; and again entrails and blood and corpses which deprived of life at once collapse and decompose and in this process exchange their natural properties for others of worse condition.
ה׳
5[63] Moses demands that one who is registered in the commonwealth of the laws should be perfect not in the lore, in which the many are schooled, of divination and voices and plausible conjectures, but in his duties towards God in which there is nothing doubtful or ambiguous but undoubted, naked truth.
ו׳
6[64] But since a longing to know the future is ingrained in all men, which longing makes them turn to haruspication and the other forms of divination in the prospect of finding certainty thereby, though actually they are brimful of uncertainty and constantly convict themselves of falsehood—while he very earnestly forbids them to follow such, yet he tells them that if they do not swerve from piety they will not be denied the full knowledge of the future.
ז׳
7[65] A prophet possessed by God will suddenly appear and give prophetic oracles. Nothing of what he says will be his own, for he that is truly under the control of divine inspiration has no power of apprehension when he speaks but serves as the channel for the insistent words of Another’s prompting. For prophets are the interpreters of God, Who makes full use of their organs of speech to set forth what He wills. These and the like are his injunctions as to the conception of the one truly existing God. Having opened with them, he next proceeds to indicate how the honours due to Him should be paid.