על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר א ס׳On the Special Laws, Book I 60
א׳
1[324] But while the law stands pre-eminent in enjoining fellowship and humanity, it preserves the high position and dignity of both virtues by not allowing anyone whose state is incurable to take refuge with them, but bidding him avaunt and keep his distance.
ב׳
2[325] Thus, knowing that in assemblies there are not a few worthless persons who steal their way in and remain unobserved in the large numbers which surround them, it guards against this danger by precluding all the unworthy from entering the holy congregation. It begins with the men who belie their sex and are affected with effemination, who debase the currency of nature and violate it by assuming the passions and the outward form of licentious women. For it expels those whose generative organs are fractured or mutilated, who husband the flower of their youthful bloom, lest it should quickly wither, and restamp the masculine cast into a feminine form.
ג׳
3[326] And it banishes not only harlots, but also the children of harlots who carry with them their mother’s shame, because their begetting and their birth has been adulterated at the fountain-head and reduced to confusion through the number of their mother’s lovers, so that they cannot recognize or distinguish their real father.
ד׳
4[327] This is a topic peculiarly susceptible of allegorical interpretation and full of matter for philosophical study. For the heads under which the impious and unholy can be characterized are not one, but many and different. Some aver that the Incorporeal Ideas or Forms are an empty name devoid of any real substance of fact, and thus they abolish in things the most essential element of their being, namely the archetypal patterns of all qualities in what exists, and on which the form and dimensions of each separate thing was modelled.
ה׳
5[328] These the holy tables of the law speak of as “crushed,” for just as anything crushed has lost its quality and form and may be literally said to be nothing more than shapeless matter, so the creed which abolishes the Forms confuses everything and reduces it to the pre-elemental state of existence, that state devoid of shape and quality.
ו׳
6[329] Could anything be more preposterous than this? For when out of that confused matter God produced all things, He did not do so with His own handiwork, since His nature, happy and blessed as it was, forbade that He should touch the limitless chaotic matter. Instead He made full use of the incorporeal potencies well denoted by their name of Forms to enable each kind to take its appropriate shape. But this other creed brings in its train no little disorder and confusion. For by abolishing the agencies which created the qualities, it abolishes the qualities also.
ז׳
7[330] There are others who in the arena of wickedness eagerly compete for the first prize in impiety and go to the further extreme of drawing a curtain over the existence of God as well as of the Forms. They assert that God does not exist, but is alleged to exist for the benefit of men who, it was supposed, would abstain from wrongdoing in their fear of Him Whom they believed to be present everywhere and to survey all things with ever-watchful eyes. These are happily called by the law “mutilated,” for they have lost by castration the conception of the Generator of all things. They are impotent to beget wisdom and practise the worst of wickednesses, atheism.
ח׳
8[331] A third class are those who have shaped their course in the opposite direction, and introduced a numerous company of deities male and female, elder and younger. Thus they have infected the world with the idea of a multiplicity of sovereigns in order to geld from the mind of men the conception of the one and truly existent Being.
ט׳
9[332] It is these who are figuratively called by the law “the children of a harlot.” For as anyone who has a harlot for his mother has no knowledge of, and can claim no affiliation to, his real father, but must accept the paternity of most or practically all her lovers and patrons, so too those who know not the one true God but invent a number of deities, false so-called, are blind to the most essential reality with which they should have been indoctrinated from the cradle to the exclusion of or before anything else. For what better theme for the learner can there be than the Being who truly exists, even God?