על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר א כ״טOn the Special Laws, Book I 29
א׳
1[145] These are the contributions levied on the personal possessions of every individual, but the priests have also other special incomings drawn very appropriately from the sacrifices offered. It is ordained that with every victim two gifts should be presented to the priest from two of its parts, the arm or shoulder from the right side and all the fat from the breast, the former as a symbol of strength and manliness and of all lawful operations in giving and receiving and general activity, the latter of gentle mildness applied to the spirited element.
ב׳
2[146] For it is held that this element resides in the breast, since nature has appointed the chest as the most suitable place for its mansion and girded it like a soldier armed against attack with the stoutest of fenceworks called the thorax, or breastplate, which she has formed of a number of bones one upon another, strong and hard, and bound them tight with unbreakable sinews.
ג׳
3[147] But of animals sacrificed away from the altars as meat for private consumption, three portions are appointed to be given to the priests, the shoulder and the jaws and the maw, as it is called. The shoulder for the reason mentioned a little above, the jaws both as belonging to that master-limb, the head, and as a first-fruit of the uttered word which needs their movement to make possible the outflow of its stream. The jaws are shaken—and thence the derivation of their name —when the tongue strikes upon them and then the whole vocal mechanism joins with them in producing sound.
ד׳
4[148] The maw is an excrescence of the belly, and it is the fate of the belly to be the manger of that irrational animal, desire, which drenched by wine-bibbing and gluttony, is perpetually flooded with relays of food and drink administered to it, and like a sow rejoices to make its home in the mire. And therefore the place of dregs and leavings has been assigned as by far the fittest for a licentious and most unseemly animal.
ה׳
5[149] But the opposite of desire is continence, the acquisition of which is a task to be practised and pressed forward by every possible means as the greatest and most perfect of blessings promoting personal and public welfare alike.
ו׳
6[150] So then desire, profane, impure and unholy, has been expelled outside the confines of virtue and well deserved is its banishment. But let continence, that pure and stainless virtue which disregards all concerns of food and drink and claims to stand superior to the pleasures of the stomach, touch the holy altars and bring with it the appendage of the belly as a reminder that it holds in contempt gluttony and greediness and all that inflames the tendencies to lust.