על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר בOn the Special Laws, Book II
א׳
1BOOK II
On The Special Laws Which Fall Under Three Of The Ten General Commandments, Namely The Third On The Duty Of Keeping Oaths, The Fourth On Reverencing The Seventh Day, And The Fifth On Honouring Parents
[1] In the preceding treatise we have dealt fully with two of the ten heads, one directed against the acknowledgement of other sovereign gods, the other against giving divine honours to any work of men’s hands. And we have described such among the particular enactments of the law as may be properly classed under either head. Let us now discuss the three next in the list, again subjoining those of the special ordinances which belong to them.
On The Special Laws Which Fall Under Three Of The Ten General Commandments, Namely The Third On The Duty Of Keeping Oaths, The Fourth On Reverencing The Seventh Day, And The Fifth On Honouring Parents
[1] In the preceding treatise we have dealt fully with two of the ten heads, one directed against the acknowledgement of other sovereign gods, the other against giving divine honours to any work of men’s hands. And we have described such among the particular enactments of the law as may be properly classed under either head. Let us now discuss the three next in the list, again subjoining those of the special ordinances which belong to them.
ב׳
2[2] The first of the three forbids us to take God’s name in vain: the good man’s word, it means, should be an oath, firm, unswerving, utterly free from falsehood, securely planted on truth. And if indeed occasion should force us to swear, the oath should be by a father and mother, their good health and welfare if they are alive, their memory if they are dead. For parents are copies and likenesses of the divine power, since they have brought the non-existent into existence. In the laws we read of one of our first founders,
ג׳
3[3] who are particularly admired for their wisdom, that he swore by the fear of his father, a fact recorded, I believe, for the benefit of posterity and to teach them the necessary lesson that they should honour their parents in the proper way by showing affection to them as benefactors and awe of them as rulers appointed by nature, and should not lightly essay to use the name of God.
ד׳
4[4] Those persons too deserve praise whose unwillingness, tardiness and shrinking, if they are ever forced to swear, raise qualms not only in the spectators but even in those who are administering the oath: such people are in the habit of saying “Yes, by ——” or “No, by ——” and add nothing more, and by thus breaking off suggest the clear sense of an oath without actually making it.
ה׳
5[5] But also a person may add to his “Yes” or “No” if he wish, not indeed the highest and most venerable and primal cause, but earth, sun, stars, heaven, the whole universe. For these are worthy of highest respect, since they have precedence in time over our place in creation, and also will remain for ever untouched by age according to the purpose of Him Who made them.
ו׳
6[6] But so great is the lightness and heedlessness shown by some that they pass by all these works of creation and allow their words to dash on to the Maker and Father of all, never staying to examine whether the place is profane or holy, whether the occasion is suitable, whether they themselves are pure in body and soul, whether the business is important or the object necessary. Instead, with unwashed hands, as the phrase goes, they make a foul brew of everything, as though Nature’s gift of a tongue justified them in using it without restraint or bridle for unlawful purposes,
ז׳
7[7] whereas that most excellent of instruments which gives clear expression to voice and words, those great benefactors of human life and creators of a sense of fellowship, should have been employed to the full by them to ascribe honour and majesty and blessedness to the Cause Which has created all things.
ח׳
8[8] As it is, so highly impious are they that on any chance matter the most tremendous titles are on their lips and they do not blush to use name after name, one piled upon another, thinking that the continual repetition of a string of oaths will secure them their object. A very foolish delusion. For in the eyes of sensible people much swearing is a proof, not of good faith, but of faithlessness.
ט׳
9[9] But if anyone has been absolutely compelled to swear on any matter whatever, so long as it is not forbidden by the law, he should use all his strength and every means in his power to make good his oath, and allow nothing to hinder him from carrying out his decision, particularly when he has taken the oath in a reasonable and sober frame of mind, not distraught by savage tempers or frenzied yearnings or uncontrollable desires, so that he does not know what he says or does.
י׳
10[10] For what is better than to practise a lifelong veracity, and to have God as our witness thereto? For an oath is nothing else than to call God to bear witness in a disputed matter, but to call God to witness to a falsehood is the very height of profanity.
י״א
11[11] To do so is practically to say outright, even though one appear not to utter a word, “I take Thee as a cloak for my wrongdoing. I am ashamed to appear a sinner, be Thou my accomplice; take the charge of my villainy upon Thyself instead of me. For it is a matter of weight to me in my wickedness not to be thought a rogue, but Thou carest not for the opinion of the multitude and troublest not that men should speak well of Thee.” Such words or thoughts are impious in the extreme. To hear them would rouse the indignation, not only of God, Who is exempt from all wickedness, but also of a father or even a stranger who knew anything at all of the flavour of virtue.
י״ב
12[12] So then, as I have said, all oaths must be made good so long as they are concerned with matters honourable and profitable for the better conduct of public or private affairs and are subject to the guidance of wisdom and justice and righteousness,
י״ג
13under which head come also the perfectly lawful vows made in acknowledgement of an abundant measure of blessings either present or expected. But when the oaths have objects of the opposite kind in view, religion forbids us to put them into execution.
י״ד
14[13] For there are some who swear at random to commit acts of theft and sacrilege or rape and adultery or assaults and murders or other similar crimes and carry them out without hesitation on the pretext that they must be faithful to their oaths, as though it were not better and more pleasing to God to abstain from wrongdoing than to abstain from breaking their oaths. Justice and every virtue are commanded by the law of our ancestors and by a statute established of old, and what else are laws and statutes but the sacred words of Nature, possessing intrinsically a fixity and stability which makes them equivalent to oaths?
ט״ו
15[14] And everyone who commits a wrong because he has sworn to do so may be assured that the act is not one of faithfulness to a pledge but breaks the oath so worthy of all careful observance with which she sets her seal on what is just and excellent. For he adds guilt to guilt when oaths taken for improper purposes which had better have been left unspoken are followed by actions which violate the law.
ט״ז
16[15] Let him abstain, then, from wrongful conduct and supplicate God, that He may grant him a share of what His gracious power can give and pardon him for what he has sworn so unadvisedly. For to choose a double measure of ill when he could disburden himself of the half of it is the act of one almost hopelessly imbecile and insane.
י״ז
17[16] But there are some who, either because through excessive moroseness their nature has lost the sense of companionship and fellow-feeling or because they are constrained by anger which rules them like a stern mistress, confirm the savagery of their temper with an oath. They declare that they will not admit such and such a person to their board or under their roof, or again, that they will not render assistance to so and so or accept anything from him till his life’s end. Sometimes they carry on their vindictiveness after that end has come and leave directions in their wills against even granting the customary rites to his corpse.
י״ח
18[17] To such persons I would give the advice which I gave to the former class, that they should propitiate God with prayers and sacrifices to win from Him what their needs demand, namely, the healing treatment of their spiritual distempers which no human power is competent to cure.
י״ט
19[18] But there are others, boastful persons, of the sort that is puffed up by arrogance, who in their craving for high position determine to have nothing to do in any way with the frugal, the truly profitable mode of living. Indeed, if any rebuke them in order to rein in the unruliness of their desires, they regard the admonition as an insult, and as they press forward to a career of luxury disregard their correctors and hold the admirable and also highly valuable instructions of wisdom a matter for laughter and mockery.
כ׳
20[19] And if they happen to have some abundance of resources and means of living on a lavish scale, they employ oaths to set the seal on their use and enjoyment of the wealth which enables them to spend so freely. Here is an instance of what I mean. A short time ago a man of considerable property who had found a loose and dissipated style of living to his taste, was in the presence of an elderly person, a relation or old family friend, I believe, who was reproving him and advising him to make a change and conduct himself with more strictness and seriousness. The other strongly resented this reproof and countered the challenge by swearing that so long as he possessed his incomings and goods in stock he would take no step in the direction of economy, either in town or country, either on shipboard or on the road, but would make display of his wealth always and everywhere. But this is evidently not so much an exhibition of wealth as of arrogance and intemperance.
כ״א
21[20] And yet to this day among those who hold high offices of authority there are not a few who possessing accumulated goods in vast numbers and abundant resources, to whom wealth is ceaselessly flowing in as from a perennial fountain, still sometimes betake themselves to the use of such things as we poor people use. Their cups are earthern, their loaves spit-baked, their extra dishes olives or cheese or greens: in the summer they wear a girdle and a thin shirt and in the winter a stout rent-proof mantle. The floor will sometimes serve for their bedstead: they have nothing to say to beds of ivory-work or made of tortoiseshell and gold, or bedding brocaded with flowers and purple-dyed garments and elaborate honey-cakes and tables spread with costly luxuries. The reason,
כ״ב
22[21] I take it, is not only that they are blessed with a fine nature, but also that they have been brought under the influence of a right training from their earliest years. That training has taught them to value the interests of the man before those of the ruler. It makes its abode in their souls, and hardly a day passes but it reminds it of their common humanity and draws them away from lofty and overweening thought, reduces their swollen dimensions, and medicines their inequality with equality.
כ״ג
23[22] And therefore they have filled their cities with plenty and abundance, with order and peace; of no good thing have they mulcted them, all good things have they bestowed freely, unsparingly and unstintedly. These and the like are the actions of noble men, rulers in the true sense.
כ״ד
24[23] Far different are the actions of the newly rich who have been wafted into opulence by a freak of fortune. They know nothing, have never even dreamt, of the true wealth which has eyes to see, whose substance is the perfect virtues and the actions which conform with them; it is a blind wealth against which they have struck and taking it for their support they fail of necessity to see the road before them and wander away into pathless wilds, admiring what deserves no serious respect and mocking at what nature would bid them honour. Such persons, when they take a mistimed oath, are rebuked and reproached in no gentle terms by the holy word. Hardly can they be purged and healed, so that even the gracious nature of God deems them unworthy of His pardon.
כ״ה
25[24] Virgins and wives are not allowed full control of their vows by the law. It puts the virgins in subjection to their fathers and sets the husbands to judge for their wives whether the oaths are to hold good or to be cancelled. That is surely reasonable, for the former, owing to their youth, do not know the value of oaths, so that they need others to judge for them, and the latter often, through want of sense, swear what would not be to their husbands’ advantage; and therefore it gave the husbands power to maintain the promise, or the reverse.
כ״ו
26[25] Widows who have none to intervene on their behalf, neither husbands from whom they have been parted, nor fathers whom they left behind them when they set out to find a new home in marriage, should be slow to swear, for their oaths stand beyond repeal, the inevitable result of their lack of protectors.
כ״ז
27[26] If anyone knows that another has perjured himself, and influenced by friendship or shame or fear rather than piety, fails to inform against him or bring him to justice, he must be liable to the same penalties as the perjurer. For to range oneself on the side of the wrongdoer is just the same as committing the wrong.
כ״ח
28[27] As to the penalties of perjury, some proceed from God, others from man. The highest and greatest are from God, Who is not gentle to such impiety, but suffers the guilty to remain for ever in their well-nigh hopeless uncleanness, a just and fitting penalty, I hold. For he who has ignored God, how can he wonder if he is ignored in his turn and is repaid in his own coin?
כ״ט
29[28] The penalties given by men are different, death or the lash. The better kind whose piety is extra-fervent maintain the penalty of death, while those whose feelings of indignation are not so stern have the offenders scourged by order of the State in a public place and in the sight of all. Indeed except to persons of a servile nature, a flogging is as severe a penalty as death.
ל׳
30[29] Such is the sum and substance of these ordinances taken literally. But we may also allegorize such parts of the subject as admit of being studied in a figurative sense. We should know, then, that nature’s right reasoning has the functions both of a father and a husband, though the conceptions attached to each are different. It acts as a husband because it deposits the seed of virtue in the soul as in a fertile field. It acts as a father because its nature is to beget good intentions and noble and worthy actions, and then to foster its offspring with the water of the truths which education and wisdom abundantly supply.
ל״א
31[30] The mind is likened on the one hand to a virgin, on the other to a woman either in widowhood, or still united to a husband. As a virgin it keeps itself pure and uncorrupted from the malignant passions, pleasures and desires and griefs and fears. Over this virgin mind the father who begat it has assumed authority. But when, like a wife, it dwells with virtuous reasoning as its worthy mate, that same reasoning promises to take charge of it and impregnates it husband-like with thoughts of highest excellence.
ל״ב
32[31] But the soul, which is bereaved of its birth-tie with sound sense or its marriage-tie with right reasoning, is widowed of all that is most excellent and, deserted by wisdom because it has chosen a life of guilt, must stand bound by the decision which it has made to its own undoing. It has none to heal its errors, no reasoning of wisdom, either to live with it as its husband or to act as its father and begetter.
ל״ג
33[32] In dealing with those who have dedicated votive offerings, not only of their property or parts of it, but of themselves, the law laid down a scale of valuation in which no regard is paid to beauty or stature or anything of the kind, but all are assessed equally, the sole distinctions made being between men and women and between children and adults.
ל״ד
34[33] It ordained that from 20 years to 60 a man should be valued at 200 drachmas of pure silver coinage and a woman at 120; from 5 to 20 years, a male at 80 and a woman at 40 drachmas; from infancy to 5 years, a male at 20 and a female at 12 drachmas, while in the case of old persons who have lived beyond 60, the men are valued at 60 drachmas and the women at 40.
ל״ה
35[34] The order that all males and all females should be 34 assessed equally at every age was made for three most cogent reasons. First, because the worth of one person’s vow is equal and similar to that of another, whether it is made by a person of great importance or one of mean estate; secondly, because it was not seemly that the votaries should be subject to the vicissitudes of slaves who are valued at a high price or on the other hand are rated low accordingly as they have or have not a fine condition of body and comeliness; thirdly, and this is the most convincing of all, that in the sight of men inequality, in the sight of God equality, is held in honour.
ל״ו
36[35] These are the regulations laid down by the law in the case of human beings. For livestock we have the following. If a man sets apart a beast from his stock, if it is a clean specimen of one of the three kinds which are allowed for sacrifice, an ox or sheep or goat, he must sacrifice that particular animal without substituting either a better for a worse or a worse for a better. For God does not delight in the fleshiness or fatness of animals, but in the blameless intention of the votary. But if he does make any exchange, he must consecrate two instead of one, both the original and its substitute.
ל״ז
37[36] If he has vowed any of his unclean cattle, he must bring it to the most highly esteemed of the priests, who must assess it not exceeding its proper value and then add a fifth part of that value, so that if a clean animal has to be provided for the sacrifice instead of this one, what is provided may not fall short of the proper value. Further, the intention is to discomfit the votary for having made a vow without reflection under the impression that the impure animal was on this occasion pure, a mistake presumably due to some mental aberration which powerfully affected him.
ל״ח
38[37] If he dedicates his house, again he should take a priest as assessor, but the sums to be disbursed by the purchasers vary. If the votary determines to redeem the house, he must spend more freely and add a fifth as a punishment for two bad things, thoughtlessness and lust of possession, the former shown in the matter of his vow, the latter in his desire to regain what he had surrendered. If the purchaser is other than the original owner, he should not pay more than the proper value.
ל״ט
39[38] The votary must not interpose long delay in accomplishing his vow. It would be a strange inconsistency if while in our dealings with men we try to antedate fulfilment of our promises, in dealing with God, Who lacks and needs nothing, we should extend it beyond the appointed time. By such slowness and procrastination we convict ourselves of the greatest of iniquities, contempt of Him whose service we must hold to be the beginning and consummation of happiness. This is enough on this subject of oaths and vows.
מ׳
40[39] The next head is concerned with the sacred seventh day. Under this head are included a great number of matters of vital importance, the different kinds of feasts; the release in the seventh year of persons who were naturally free but through times of adversity are in servitude; the charity shown by creditors to debtors in cancelling loans to their fellow-nationals, this also in the seventh year; the rest allowed both in the lowlands and the uplands to the fertile soil at intervals of six years; and the laws laid down with respect to the fiftieth year. The mere recital of all these is enough to make the naturally gifted perfect in virtue without any effort on their part and to produce some degree of obedience in the rebellious and hard-natured.
מ״א
41[40] Now the part played by seven among the numbers has been described at length in an earlier place, where we have discussed the properties which it possesses within the decad, and its close connexion with ten itself and with four, which is the origin and source of ten. Also we have shewn how a sevenfold addition of successive numbers beginning with unity produces twenty-eight, a perfect number, equal to the sum of its factors; again, how when brought into a geometrical progression, it produces simultaneously a square and a cube, besides the numberless other beautiful results which the study of it reveals. On these numerical points we must not linger at the present juncture, but we must examine each specific subject which lies before us included under the general head, beginning with the first; and the first subject, as we saw, is the feasts.
מ״ב
42[41] There are in all ten feasts which are recorded in the law. The first, the mention of which may perhaps cause some surprise, is the feast of every day. The second is that held on the seventh day with six days between, called by the Hebrews in their native tongue Sabbath. The third is the new moon which follows the conjunction of the moon with the sun. The fourth is the “Crossing” festival called Pascha. The fifth is the offering of the first ears, the sacred Sheaf. The sixth is the Unleavened Bread. Then comes what is emphatically a seventh, being the feast of Sevens or Weeks. Eighth is the Sacred-month-day, ninth is the Fast, tenth the feast of Tabernacles which concludes the yearly festivals and thus ends up with a perfect number ten. We must begin with the first of these.
מ״ג
43[42] When the law records that every day is a festival, it accommodates itself to the blameless life of righteous men who follow nature and her ordinances. And if only the vices had not conquered and dominated the thoughts in us which seek the truly profitable and dislodged them from each soul—if instead the forces of the virtues had remained unvanquished throughout, the time from birth to death would be one continuous feast, and houses and cities dwelling in security and leisure would have been full of all good things with everything tranquil around them.
מ״ד
44[43] As it is, the overreaching and the assaults which men and women alike contrive against themselves and each other have cleft a breach in the continuous line of this cheerful gaiety. Here is a clear proof of what I am saying.
מ״ה
45[44] All who practise wisdom, either in Grecian or barbarian lands, and live a blameless and irreproachable life, choosing neither to inflict nor retaliate injustice, avoid the gathering of busy-bodies and abjure the scenes which they haunt, such as law-courts, council-chambers, markets, congregations and in general any gathering or assemblage of careless men.
מ״ו
46[45] Their own aspirations are for a life of peace, free from warring. They are the closest observers of nature and all that it contains; earth, sea, air and heaven and the various forms of being which inhabit them are food for their research, as in mind and thought they share the ranging of the moon and sun and the ordered march of the other stars fixed and planetary. While their bodies are firmly planted on the land they provide their souls with wings, so that they may traverse the upper air and gain full contemplation of the powers which dwell there, as behoves true “cosmopolitans” who have recognized the world to be a city having for its citizens the associates of wisdom, registered as such by virtue to whom is entrusted the headship of the universal commonwealth.
מ״ז
47[46] Such men filled with high worthiness, inured to disregard ills of the body or of external things, schooled to hold things indifferent as indeed indifferent, armed against the pleasures and lusts, ever eager to take their stand superior to the passions in general, trained to use every effort to overthrow the formidable menace which those passions have built up against them, never swerving under the blows of fortune because they have calculated beforehand the force of its assaults; since the heaviest adversities are lightened by anticipation, when the mind ceases to find anything strange in the event and apprehends it but dully as it might some stale and familiar story—such men, we say, in the delight of their virtues, naturally make their whole life a feast.
מ״ח
48[47] These are indeed but a small number left in their cities like an ember of wisdom to smoulder, that virtue may not be altogether extinguished and lost to our race.
מ״ט
49[48] But if only everywhere men had thought and felt as these few, and become what nature intended them to be, all of them blameless and guiltless and lovers of sound sense, rejoicing in moral excellence just because it is what it is and counting it the only true good and all the other goods but slaves and vassals, subject to their authority, the cities would have been brimful of happiness, utterly free from all that causes grief and fears, and packed with what produces joys and states of well-being, so that each season as it comes would give full opportunity for cheerful living and the whole cycle of the year would be a feast.
נ׳
50[49] And therefore in the judgement of truth none of the wicked keeps a feast, even for the shortest time, tormented as he is by consciousness of wrongdoing and depressed in soul, even though he simulates a smile with his face. For where does the wicked man find a season for true rejoicing? He whose every plan is for evil, whose life-mate is folly, with whom everything, tongue, belly and organs of generation, is against what is seasonable.
נ״א
51[50] For with the first he blurts out matters of secrecy which call for silence, while in his greed he fills the second with viands unlimited and strong drink in great quantities, and as for the third, he misuses them for abominable lusts and forms of intercourse forbidden by all laws. He not only attacks in his fury the marriage-beds of others, but even plays the pederast and forces the male type of nature to debase and convert itself into the feminine form, just to indulge a polluted and accursed passion. For this reason Moses,
נ״ב
52[51] great here as ever, seeing how vast was the beauty which belonged to the true feast, held that its perfection was beyond the capacity of human nature to realize, and consecrated it to God with these very words,
נ״ג
53[52] “The Lord’s feasts.” For when he considered the sorrowful and terror-stricken condition of our race, how charged it is with numberless evils generated by the greedy desires of the soul and also by the infirmities of the body, increased by the vicissitudes of fortune and the mutual onslaughts of neighbours against neighbours who inflict and suffer countless wrongs, he could not but wonder that anyone, tossed about on so vast a sea of events, whether of his own intending or not, and unable to find tranquility or the secure anchorage of a life kept safe from danger, could really hold a feast, not in the sense in which the word is commonly used, but in the true sense; and the true sense is, to find delight and festivity in the contemplation of the world and its contents and in following nature and in bringing words into harmony with deeds and deeds with words.
נ״ד
54[53] And therefore it was a necessary pronouncement that the feasts belonged to God alone, for God alone is happy and blessed, exempt from all evil, filled with perfect forms of good, or rather, if the real truth be told, Himself the good, Who showers the particular goods on heaven and earth.
נ״ה
55[54] And so it was that in the days of old a certain mind of rich intelligence, her passions now calmed within her, smiled because joy lay within her and filled her womb. And when, as she considered the matter, it seemed to her that joy might well be the peculiar property of God alone, and that she herself was sinning in taking for her own conditions of well-being above human capacity, she was afraid, and denied the laughter of her soul until her doubts were set at rest.
נ״ו
56[55] For the gracious God allayed her fears by an oracle in which He bade her acknowledge that she laughed, meaning thus to teach us the lesson that joy is not altogether denied to the creature. Joy is of two kinds. One is unmixed and of the utmost purity, admitting nothing whatever of the nature opposite to its own. This joy belongs to God and to no other. The other which flows from it is a mixed stream blended with lesser tributaries of sorrow, and if the blend is such that the pleasant ingredients outnumber the unpleasant, the wise man receives it as the greatest of gifts. So much for this matter.
נ״ז
57[56] After this continuous unbroken feast which has neither beginning nor end, the second to be observed is the sacred seventh day, recurring with six days between. Some have given to it the name of virgin, having before their eyes its surpassing chastity. They also call her the motherless, begotten by the father of the universe alone, the ideal form of the male sex with nothing of the female. It is the manliest and doughtiest of numbers, well gifted by nature for sovereignty and leadership. Some give it the name of the “season,” judging its conceptual nature from its manifestation in the realm of sense.
נ״ח
58[57] For seven is a factor common to all the phenomena which stand highest in the world of sensible things and serve to consummate in due order transitions of the year and recurring seasons. Such are the seven planets, the Great Bear, the Pleiades and the cycles of the moon, as it waxes and wanes, and the movements, harmonious and grand beyond description, of the other heavenly bodies.
נ״ט
59[58] But Moses from a higher point of view gave it the name of completion and full perfection when he laid down six as the number under which the parts of the universe were brought into being, seven as that under which they were perfected. For six is even-odd, formed out of twice three with the odd part as its male element and the even as its feminine, and these two, by the immutable laws of nature, are the sources of generation.
ס׳
60[59] But seven is a number entirely uncompounded, and may be quite properly described as the light of six. For seven reveals as completed what six has produced, and therefore it may be quite rightly entitled the birthday of the world, whereon the Father’s perfect work, compounded of perfect parts, was revealed as what it was.
ס״א
61[60] On this day we are commanded to abstain from all work, not because the law inculcates slackness; on the contrary it always inures men to endure hardship and incites them to labour, and spurns those who would idle their time away, and accordingly is plain in its directions to work the full six days. Its object is rather to give men relaxation from continuous and unending toil and by refreshing their bodies with a regularly calculated system of remissions, to send them out renewed to their old activities. For a breathing-space enables not merely ordinary people but athletes also to collect their strength and with a stronger force behind them to undertake promptly and patiently each of the tasks set before them.
ס״ב
62[61] Further, when He forbids bodily labour on the seventh day, He permits the exercise of the higher activities, namely, those employed in the study of the principles of virtue’s lore. For the law bids us take the time for studying philosophy and thereby improve the soul and the dominant mind.
ס״ג
63[62] So each seventh day there stand wide open in every city thousands of schools of good sense, temperance, courage, justice and the other virtues in which the scholars sit in order quietly with ears alert and with full attention, so much do they thirst for the draught which the teacher’s words supply, while one of special experience rises and sets forth what is the best and sure to be profitable and will make the whole of life grow to something better.
ס״ד
64[63] But among the vast number of particular truths and principles there studied, there stand out practically high above the others two main heads: one of duty to God as shewn by piety and holiness, one of duty to men as shewn by humanity and justice, each of them splitting up into multiform branches, all highly laudable.
ס״ה
65[64] These things shew clearly that Moses does not allow any of those who use his sacred instruction to remain inactive at any season. But since we consist of body and soul, he assigned to the body its proper tasks and similarly to the soul what falls to its share, and his earnest desire was, that the two should be waiting to relieve each other. Thus while the body is working, the soul enjoys a respite, but when the body takes its rest, the soul resumes its work, and thus the best forms of life, the theoretical and the practical, take their turn in replacing each other. The practical life has six as its number allotted for ministering to the body. The theoretical has seven for knowledge and perfection of the mind.
ס״ו
66[65] It is forbidden to light any fire on this day, fire being regarded as the source and origin of life, since without it nothing can be executed which serves the requirements necessary for existence. And thus the prohibition of the highest and earliest instrument needed in the arts, and especially those of the mechanical kind, acts as a barrier to those required for the particular forms of service.
ס״ז
67[66] But it would seem that his further enactments were given for the sake of the more disobedient who refused to pay attention to his commandments, when he not only requires the free men to abstain from work on the Sabbath, but gives the same permission to men-servants and handmaids, and sends them a message of security and almost of freedom after every six days, to teach both masters and men an admirable lesson.
ס״ח
68[67] The masters must be accustomed to work themselves without waiting for the offices and attentions of their menials, and so in the event of times of difficulty such as occur through the vicissitudes of human affairs, they may not through unfamiliarity with personal service lose heart at the outset and despair of accomplishing the tasks set before them, but use the different parts of their body with more nimbleness and shew a robust and easy activity; while on the other hand the servants are not to refuse to entertain still higher hopes, but should find in the relaxation allowed after six days an ember or spark of freedom, and look forward to their complete liberation if they continue to serve well and loyally.
ס״ט
69[68] But the result of this occasional submission of the free to do the menial offices of the slave, together with the immunity allowed to the slave, will be a step forward in human conduct towards the perfection of virtue, when both the seemingly distinguished and the meaner sort remember equality and repay to each other the debt incumbent on them.
ע׳
70[69] But the holiday of the Sabbath is given by the law not only to servants but also to the cattle, though there might well be a distinction. For servants are free by nature, no man being naturally a slave, but the unreasoning animals are intended to be ready for the use and service of men and therefore rank as slaves. Yet all the same, though it is their proper business to carry burdens and undergo toils and labour for their owners, they obtain their respite on the seventh days.
ע״א
71[70] There is no need to go through the rest of the list, when even the ox who serves the most useful and indispensable purposes in human life, namely ploughing when the soil is prepared for the sowing, and again thrashing when the sheaves are brought in for the purging of the fruit, is then kept free from the yoke and enjoys the birthday festival of the world. So universally has the sanctity of the day extended its influence.
ע״ב
72[71] So high is the reverence which he assigns to the seventh day that other things which share in the qualities of the number are honoured in his estimation. Thus he lays down a rule for cancellation of debts in every seventh year, both as a succour to the poor and as a challenge to the rich to shew humanity, in order that by giving some share of their own to the needy they may expect to receive the same kindness themselves, if any disaster befall them. Human vicissitudes are manifold, and life is not always on the same anchorage, but is like an unsteady wind, ever veering round to the opposite quarter.
ע״ג
73[72] Now the best course would be that the creditors’ liberality should be extended to all debtors. But since they are not all capable of showing magnanimity, some being under the dominion of their money or not very well off, he laid down that they too should make a contribution, the sacrifice of which would not give them pain.
ע״ד
74[73] He does not allow them to exact money from their fellow-nationals, but does permit the recovery of dues from the others. He distinguishes the two by calling the first by the appropriate name of brethren, suggesting that none should grudge to give of his own to those whom nature has made his brothers and fellow-heirs. Those who are not of the same nation he describes as aliens, reasonably enough, and the condition of the alien excludes any idea of partnership, unless indeed by a transcendency of virtues he converts even it into a tie of kinship, since it is a general truth that common citizenship rests on virtues and laws which propound the morally beautiful as the sole good.
ע״ה
75[74] Now lending money on interest is a blameworthy action, for a person who borrows is not living on a superabundance of means, but is obviously in need, and since he is compelled to pay the interest as well as the capital, he must necessarily be in the utmost straits. And while he thinks he is being benefited by the loan, he is actually like senseless animals suffering further damage from the bait which is set before him.
ע״ו
76[75] I ask you, Sir Moneylender, why do you disguise your want of a partner’s feeling by pretending to act as a partner? Why do you assume outwardly a kindly and charitable appearance but display in your actions inhumanity and a savage brutality, exacting more than you lend, sometimes double, reducing the pauper to further depths of poverty?
ע״ז
77[76] And therefore no one sympathizes when in your eagerness for larger gains you lose your capital as well. In their glee all call you extortioner and money-grubber and other similar terms, you who have lain in wait for the misfortunes of others, and regarded their ill-luck as your own good luck.
ע״ח
78[77] It has been said that vice has no sense of sight; so too the moneylender is blind, and has no vision of the time of repayment, when it will hardly be possible, if at all, to obtain what he has expected to gain by his greed.
ע״ט
79[78] Such a person may well pay the penalty of his avarice by receiving back merely what he provided, and learn not to make a trade of other people’s misfortunes and enrich himself in improper ways. And the borrowers should be granted the privilege of the law’s charity, and pay neither simple nor compound interest, but just the principal. For later, as the proper occasion arise, they will make the same sacrifice to their present creditors and requite with equal assistance those who were the first to bestow the benefit.
פ׳
80[79] After ordinances of this sort he follows them by laying down a law which breathes kindness and humanity throughout. “If,” he says, “one of your brethren is sold to you, let him continue in slavery for six years but in the seventh be set free without payment.”
פ״א
81[80] Here again he uses the term brother of a fellow-national, and by this name indirectly sows in the soul of the owner the thoughts of his close relationship to the person in his power. It bids him not despise him as a stranger who has no charm to win his affection, but allow the lesson which the holy word suggests to create a preliminary sense of kinship, and thus feel no resentment at his approaching liberation.
פ״ב
82[81] For people in this position, though we find them called slaves, are in reality labourers who undertake the service just to procure themselves the necessaries of life, however much some may bluster about the rights of absolute power which they exercise over them.
פ״ג
83[82] We must abate their truculence by repeating these excellent injunctions of the law. The man whom you call a slave, my friend, is a hired person, himself too a man, ultimately your kinsman, further of the same nation, perhaps also of the same tribe and ward, reduced to the guise which he now adopts by actual need.
פ״ד
84[83] Expel, then, from your soul that evil and malignant thing, arrogance. Deal with him as your hired servant, both in what you give and what you take. As for the latter, he will render you his services without the slightest backwardness always and everywhere without procrastination, and anticipate your orders with zeal and rapidity. And you must give him in return food and raiment and take care for his other needs. Do not harness him like an unreasoning animal nor oppress him with weights too heavy and too numerous for his capacity, nor heap insults upon him, nor drag him down by threats and menaces into cruel despondency. Rather grant him time and places for respite according to some regular rule. For while “not too much of anything” is an excellent maxim in every case, it is particularly so as between masters and servants.
פ״ה
85[84] When however you have received his services for the fullest term required, namely, six years, and when the truly sacred number of the seventh year is about to begin, grant his freedom to him who is naturally free and grant it without hesitation, my friend, and rejoice that you have found an opportunity of benefiting the highest of living creatures, man, in his chief interest. For a slave can have no greater boon than freedom.
פ״ו
86[85] Be glad, too, to crown your benefaction by bestowing something of each of your various kinds of property to start him on his way. For it is a praise to you that he should not leave your home penniless but well stocked in resources to procure what is necessary. Otherwise the same thing may happen again. He may be reduced by need to his old unhappy plight and compelled to undertake slavery again through lack of the means of life, and the boon you bestowed upon him may be cancelled. So much for the poor.
פ״ז
87[86] Then follows a commandment to let the land lie fallow during the seventh year. There are several reasons for this. In the first place he wished to give seven its honourable position in all the series in which time is measured, namely, days, months and years. For every seventh day is holy, a Sabbath as the Hebrews call it, and it is in the seventh month in every year that the chief of all the feasts falls, and therefore naturally the seventh year also has been marked out for a share in the dignity which belongs to the number.
פ״ח
88[87] And there is this second reason. Do not, he says, be entirely under the power of lucre, but submit voluntarily to some loss, so that you may find it easy to bear some involuntary injury, if ever it should occur, instead of resenting it as some strange and alien misfortune and falling into despair. For some of the rich are so poor-spirited that when adversity overtakes them, they are as mournful and depressed as if they had been robbed of their whole substance.
פ״ט
89[88] But among the followers of Moses all who have been his true disciples, trained in his excellent institutions from their earliest years, by allowing even rich territory to lie idle inure themselves to bear privations calmly and by the lesson of magnanimity thus learned voluntarily and deliberately to let even undoubted sources of wealth fall almost from their very hands.
צ׳
90[89] There is also, I think, this third suggestion, that men should absolutely abstain from putting any oppressive burden upon anyone else. For if the different parts of the earth which cannot share in any sensations of pain or pleasure yet have to be given respite, how much more must this be the case with men who not only possess the sense which is common also to the irrational animals but even the special gift of reason through which the painful feelings caused by toil and labour stamp and record themselves in mental pictures, more vivid than mere sensation!
צ״א
91[90] Let so-called masters therefore cease from imposing upon their slaves severe and scarcely endurable orders, which break down their bodies by violent usage and force the soul to collapse before the body.
צ״ב
92[91] You need not grudge to moderate your orders. The result will be that you yourselves will enjoy proper attention and that your servants will carry out their orders readily and accept their duties not just for a short time to be abandoned through wearying too quickly, and, indeed, we may say, as if old age had prematurely overtaken them in their labours. On the contrary, they will prolong their youth to the utmost, like athletes, not those who fatten themselves up into full fleshiness, but those who regularly train themselves by “dry sweatings” to acquire what is necessary and useful for life.
צ״ג
93[92] So too let rulers of cities cease from racking them with taxes and tolls as heavy as they are constant. Such rulers both fill their own coffers and while hoarding money hoard also illiberal vices which defile the whole of civic life.
צ״ד
94[93] For they purposely choose as tax-gatherers the most ruthless of men, brimful of inhumanity, and put into their hands resources for overreaching. These persons add to their natural brutality the immunity they gain from their masters’ instructions, and in their determination to accommodate every action to those masters’ pleasure they leave no severity untried, however barbarous, and banish mercy and gentleness even from their dreams.
צ״ה
95[94] And therefore in carrying out their collecting they create universal chaos and confusion and apply their exactions not merely to the property of their victims but also to their bodies, on which they inflict insults and outrages and forms of torture quite original in their savagery.
צ״ו
96Indeed, I have heard of persons who, actuated by abnormal frenzy and cruelty, have not even spared the dead, persons who become so utterly brutalized that they venture even to flog corpses with whips.
צ״ז
97[95] And when anyone censured the extraordinary cruelty shewn in refusing to allow even death, the release and in very truth the “end” of all ills, to procure freedom from insult for those who are now beyond its reach, and in causing them to undergo outrage instead of the normal rites of burial, the line of defence adopted was worse than the accusation. They treated the dead, they said, with such contempt not for the useless purpose of insulting the deaf and senseless dust but in order to excite the pity of those who were related to them by birth or some other tie of fellowship, and thus urge them to ransom the bodies of their friends by making a final gift in payment for them.
צ״ח
98[96] Foolish, foolish people, I would say to them, have you not first learnt the lesson which you teach, or are you competent to induce others to shew pity, even with the cruellest actions before them, when you have exscinded all kindly and humane feelings from your own souls? And this you have done, though you had no lack of good advisers, particularly in our laws, which have relieved even the land from its yearly tolls and provided it with a rest and respite.
צ״ט
99[97] This land, though to all appearance a lifeless thing, is put into a condition to make its requital and to repay a boon which it received as a free gift but is now eager to return. For the immunity which it has during the seventh year and its rest from labour and complete freedom during the whole annual cycle give it a fertility in the next year which causes it to bear twice as much or even many times as much as in the previous years.
ק׳
100[98] We may also note that the trainers of athletes take much the same line in dealing with their pupils. When they have thoroughly drilled them by an unbroken course of exercises, before they reach the point of exhaustion, they give them a fresh lease of life by providing relaxations, not only from the labour of the training itself but from the dietary regulations as to food and drink, the hardships of which they abate in order to make the soul cheerful and the body comfortable.
ק״א
101[99] And we must not suppose that here we have the professional trainers to hard work appearing as instructors in slackness and luxury; they are following a scientific method by which further strength and power is given to what is already strong and powerful, and vigour enhanced as though it were a harmony by alternating relaxation with tension.
ק״ב
102[100] This truth I have learnt from the never-failing wisdom of nature who, knowing how toil-worn and weary our race becomes, divided our time into day and night, giving the hours of wakefulness to one and of sleep to the other.
ק״ג
103[101] For, most careful of mothers, her anxious thought was that her children should not be exhausted. In the daylight she wakens our bodies and stimulates them to carry out all the offices and demands of life, and reproaches those who are making it their practice to loiter through life in an idle and voluptuous way. But at night she sounds the recall as in war and summons them to repose and take care of their bodies.
ק״ד
104[102] And men casting off all the sore burden of affairs which has lain heavy upon them from morn till eve, turn homewards and betake themselves to rest, and in the deep sleep which falls upon them cast off the distempers of their daylight troubles, and then again unwearied and full of fresh vigour hasten eagerly each to his own familiar occupation.
ק״ה
105[103] This double course nature has assigned to men by means of sleeping and waking with the result that by alternating activity with inaction they have increased readiness and nimbleness in the various parts of their bodies.
ק״ו
106[104] These considerations the prophetic author of our laws had before his eyes when he proclaimed a rest for the land and made the husbandman stay his work after six years. But he gave this enactment not only on the grounds which I have mentioned but also moved by that habitual kindliness which he aims at infusing into every part of his legislation, thereby impressing on the readers of the sacred scriptures the stamp of good and neighbourly customs.
ק״ז
107[105] For he forbids them to close up any field during the seventh year. All olive-yards and vineyards are to be left wide open and so with the other kinds of property, whether of sown crops or orchard-trees, thus giving an unrestricted use of such fruits as are of natural growth to the poor quite as much, if not more so, than to the owners.
ק״ח
108[106] Thus on the one hand he did not allow the masters to do any work of tillage because he wished to avoid giving them the painful feeling that they had incurred the expenditure but did not receive the income in return, and on the other hand he thought fit that the poor should for this year at any rate enjoy as their own what appeared to belong to others, and in this way took from them any appearance of humiliation or possibility of being reproached as beggars.
ק״ט
109[107] May not our passionate affection well go out to laws charged with such kindly feeling, which teaches the rich to give liberally and share what they have with others and encourages the poor not to be always dancing attendance on the houses of the wealthy, as though compelled to resort thither to make up their own deficiency, but sometimes also to come claiming a source of wealth in the fruits which, as I have said, develop untilled and which they can treat as their own?
ק״י
110[108] Widows and orphans and all others who are neglected and ignored because they have no surplus of income have at this time such a surplus and find themselves suddenly affluent through the gifts of God, Who invites them to share with the owners under the sanction of the holy number seven.
קי״א
111[109] And indeed all stock-breeders feel at liberty to take out their own cattle in search of pasturage and to select meadow-land of good herbage and particularly suitable for grazing their beasts. Thus they take full advantage of the immunity secured by the time of freedom. And this is not opposed by any grudging on the master’s side. They are under the sway of a very ancient custom, which through long familiarity has won its way to the standing of nature.
קי״ב
112[110] While laying down this first foundation of moderation and humanity, he built on it by adding years to the number of seven times seven and consecrated the whole of the fiftieth year. This he made the subject of many special enactments, all of remarkable excellence, apart from those which are common to other seventh years.
קי״ג
113[111] The first of these enactments is as follows. He considers that alienated estates ought to be restored to their original possessors in order that the apportionments should be secured to the families and that no one to whom they had been allotted should be altogether deprived of the grant.
קי״ד
114[112] For since times of adversity often arise which make it necessary for some persons to sell their property, he made provision for the just needs of such persons and at the same time took steps to prevent the purchasers being deceived, by accompanying the permission to the vendors to sell with very clear instructions to the purchasers as to the terms of the transaction.
קי״ה
115[113] “Do not pay the price,” he says, “of complete ownership, but only for a fixed number of years and a lower limit than fifty.” For the sale should represent not real property but fruits, and this for two most convincing reasons. One is that the whole country is called God’s property, and it is against religion to have anything that is God’s property registered under other masters. Another reason is that each of the holders has a portion assigned to him by lot, and that this should be taken from him is contrary to the law’s conception of justice.
קי״ו
116[114] Anyone, therefore, who before the fifty years are completed has the means to recover his own property, or anyone else very closely related to him, is urged by the lawgiver to take every step to recover the land at the price which he got for it, and not to occasion loss to the purchaser who helped him at the time when he needed it.
קי״ז
117[115] On the other hand he sympathized with the poor man and shewed him pity by restoring to him the additional wealth which he originally possessed, excepting fields which had been dedicated by a vow, and therefore rank with votive offerings. Religion forbids that time should affect the validity of a votive offering, and therefore it is ordained that the proper price for such estates should be demanded and that no concessions should be made to the votary.
קי״ח
118[116] These are the rules for cases where the apportionments and holdings consist of land. There are different regulations as to houses. Houses in some cases belong to cities and are inside the walls, and others are farm-buildings in the country outside the walls. Consequently the law allows the latter to be redeemable at any time, and prescribes that any that have not been ransomed by the fiftieth year should be restored without compensation to the former owner as in the case of real property, for farm-buildings are a part of real property.
קי״ט
119[117] But houses within the walls may be recoverable by the vendors for the space of a year, but after the year are absolutely secured to the purchasers who are not liable to suffer any injury from the general remission in the fiftieth year.
ק״כ
120[118] His reason is that he wishes to give the newcomers also a basis on which they may feel themselves firmly established in the country. For since they have no apportionment of land as they were not counted when the holdings were distributed, the law assigned to them their houses in fee simple in its anxiety that those who had come as suppliants and refugees to the laws should not be cast adrift.
קכ״א
121[119] For when the land was apportioned according to the tribes the cities were not distributed, nor indeed built in city form at all, and the inhabitants took for their dwellings the outbuildings in the country. Subsequently when they left these and became concentrated as the feeling of unity and friendship naturally grew stronger in the course of many years, they built houses adjacent to each other, thus forming cities. And of these, as I have said, they assigned a share to the newcomers, to prevent them finding themselves cut off from holding property both in the country and in the cities.
קכ״ב
122[120] The legislation with regard to the consecrated tribe is as follows. The temple-keepers were not allotted a section of land by the law, which considered that they were sufficiently provided for by the first-fruits, but assigned them instead forty-eight cities to dwell in, with a surrounding frontage in each case of two thousand cubits.
קכ״ג
123[121] Houses within these were not, like the others within the walls, secured to the purchasers, if the vendors could not find the means to redeem them within the year, but were liable to be redeemed for an unlimited period just as the lay population could redeem the farm buildings, to which the dwelling-houses of the Levites correspond. For these were all that fell to their share in that great territory, and thus he considered that being once received they ought not to be taken back, any more than the farm-buildings in the case of those to whom the holdings were apportioned. So much for the subject of houses.
קכ״ד
124[122] Similar rules to those already stated are laid down as to the relations between creditors and debtors and between servants and masters. Creditors are not to exact interest from their fellow-nationals but to be content with recovering what they provided. Masters are to treat their purchased slaves as their hired servants, not as their slaves by nature, and give them secure access to liberty on the spot if they can provide their ransom, or in the case of the needy at a later time, when either the seventh year from the beginning of their slavery or the fiftieth arrives, in the latter case even though only a single day has elapsed since the man was reduced to that condition. For that time is accepted as the remission and actually is such, when all reverse their course and turn back to the prosperity of the past.
קכ״ה
125[123] But the law does permit the acquisition of slaves from other nations for two reasons; first, that a distinction should be made between fellow-countrymen and aliens; secondly, that that most indispensable possession, domestic service, should not be absolutely excluded from his commonwealth. For the course of life contains a vast number of circumstances which demand the ministrations of slaves.
קכ״ו
126[124] The heirs of parents are to be sons, or failing sons daughters. For just as in nature men take precedence of women, so too in the scale of relationships they should take the first place in succeeding to the property and filling the position of the departed which they have ceased to hold, debarred by an inevitable law which admits to immortality nothing that is mortal or earth-born.
קכ״ז
127[125] But if virgins are left without a dower, nothing of the kind having been settled on them by the parents while still alive, they should share equally with the males. The charge of protecting the girls left thus desolate and superintending their development, and the expenses of providing anything required for their maintenance and education as befits maidens should fall upon the head magistrate ; also when the time comes, the duty of arranging a suitable marriage and choosing husbands who are selected on their merits and approved in all respects.
קכ״ח
128[126] And these should be, if possible, of the same family as the girls, or if that cannot be, at any rate of the same ward and tribe, in order that the portions assigned as dowry should not be alienated by inter-marriage with other tribes, but should retain the place given to them in the allotments originally made on the basis of tribes.
קכ״ט
129[127] But if the deceased has no descendants, the brothers must proceed to the succession, for brothers rank next in tables of relationship with sons and daughters. If the dead man has no brother, the succession must pass to the uncles on the father’s side, and if there are no uncles, to the aunts, and then to the next nearest among their other connexions or kinsfolk.
ק״ל
130[128] But if kinsfolk are so scarce that no blood-relation remains, then the tribe shall be the heir. For the tribe is in a sense a kinship with a wider and more all-embracing compass.
קל״א
131[129] One question, however, which is raised by some inquirers should not be passed over in silence. Why, they ask, does the Law when dealing with the regulations of inheritance mention kinsmen of every degree and fellow-wardsmen and fellow-tribesmen, but leaves parents alone unmentioned who would naturally inherit from the children as the children do from them? The answer, good sir, is that the law, God-given as it is, and ever desirous to follow the course of nature, held that no sinister thought should be introduced. Parents pray that they may leave behind them alive the children they have begotten to succeed to their name, race and property, and the imprecations of their implacable enemies are just the opposite, that the sons and daughters may die before their parents.
קל״ב
132[130] Now he did not wish to speak plainly of anything so out of tune with and discordant to the harmony and concord which prevails throughout the cosmic order as the death of children while the parents survive, and therefore he complied both with necessity and decency in not ordaining that mothers and fathers should inherit from their sons and daughters. He knew that such an event was not in accordance with the ordinary course of life or with nature.
קל״ג
133[131] So while he avoided appointing the parents in undisguised terms as heirs to the property of their dead children, lest by assigning to them an acquisition of so undesirable a kind he should seem to be casting a slur upon their mourning or reminding them of their misfortunes, he adopted another way of conveying the ownership to them, a simple specific for a great mischief.
קל״ד
134[132] What was this way? He declares the father’s brothers to be the heirs of their nephews, a privilege doubtless given to the uncle for the sake of the father, unless anyone is foolish enough to suppose that a person who honours A for the sake of B is deliberately dishonouring B. Is it the case that those who pay court to the acquaintances of their friends are neglecting those friends? Is it not rather the truth that their affectionate care for all that might honour these acquaintances shews regard for the friends also? On the same principle the law, when it nominates the father’s brother to share in the inheritance because of his relationship to the father, much more nominates the father, not in actual words it is true for reasons already stated, but with a force more recognizable than words, leaving no doubt of the intention of the lawgiver.
קל״ה
135[133] The eldest son does not share equally with his juniors, but is adjudged a double portion, one reason being that his parents who before were but man and wife, owe to the first-born the fact that they have later become father and mother. Another is that it is their first-born who began to use these names in addressing his parents. The third reason is the most important, that what was before their birth a house of barren stock has become fruitful for the preservation of the human race, a preservation which is sown in marriage and fructified in the birth of children, starting with the eldest.
קל״ו
136[134]This was the reason, I suppose, that the first-born sons of the enemies who had shewn themselves so merciless in action, were cut off in wholesale massacre in a single night, as the Holy Scriptures tell us, while the first-born of our nation were dedicated by consecration as a thank-offering to God. For it was just that on the enemy should fall the weight of a blow for which no consolation was possible, namely, the destruction of their foremost rank, while God Who wrought the salvation was honoured by the dedication as first-fruits of those who headed the line of children.
קל״ז
137[135] But there are some who after marrying and begetting children unlearn in their later days what they knew of self-restraint and are wrecked on the reef of incontinence. Seized with a mad passion for other women, they maltreat those who hitherto belonged to them and behave to the children they have begotten by them as though they were uncles rather than fathers, copy the unrighteousness shewn by stepmothers to the first family and altogether devote themselves and all they have to the second wives and their children, overcome by the vilest of passions, voluptuousness. Such lusts the law would not have hesitated to bridle if it were possible, and prevent them from frisking and plunging still more.
קל״ח
138[136] But since it is difficult, or rather impossible, to heal the frenzy goaded into savagery, it left the father to his fate as one in the grip of an incurable disease but did not disregard the son of the wife who was wronged through his passion for another, but bade him take the double portion in the distribution between the brothers.
קל״ט
139[137] There are several reasons for this. In the first place, it punishes the culprit by forcing him to give good treatment to the person to whom he intended to give the reverse and renders him incapable of carrying out his ill-judged judgement. This it effects by conferring benefits on the person who was likely to suffer loss at his hands, and by taking upon itself the parental position which had been abandoned by the natural father in so far as the eldest child was concerned.
ק״מ
140[138] Secondly, it shews mercy and pity for the victims of injustice whom it relieves of a very grievous trouble by enabling them to share in the boon thus bestowed. For naturally we may suppose that the gratification felt by the son at obtaining the double portion is shared by the mother, encouraged as she is by the humanity of the law which refuses to allow her and her family to lie entirely at the mercy of her enemies.
קמ״א
141[139] And there was a third reason. Being gifted with a power to judge justly, it reflected that the father had bestowed his bounties generously on the children of the beloved wife because of his affection for her, but left the children of the hated wife entirely out of consideration owing to his hostility to their mother, so that the former even in his lifetime inherited more than their equal share, and the latter might expect at his death to find themselves robbed of the whole patrimony. And therefore it decreed that the son of the discarded wife should have the eldest son’s privilege of the double share, in order to equalize the partition between both families. Enough on these matters.
קמ״ב
142[140] Following the order stated above, we record the third type of feast which we will proceed to explain. This is the New Moon, or beginning of the lunar month, namely the period between one conjunction and the next, the length of which has been accurately calculated in the astronomical schools. The new moon holds its place among the feasts for many reasons. First, because it is the beginning of the month, and the beginning, both in number and in time, deserves honour. Secondly, because when it arrives, nothing in heaven is left without light, for while at the conjunction, when the moon is lost to sight under the sun, the side which faces earth is darkened, when the new month begins it resumes its natural brightness.
קמ״ג
143[141] The third reason is, that the stronger or more powerful element at that time supplies the help which is needed to the smaller and weaker. For it is just then that the sun begins to illumine the moon with the light which we perceive and the moon reveals its own beauty to the eye. And this is surely an obvious lesson inculcating kindness and humanity and bidding men never grudge their own good things, but imitating the blessed and happy beings in heaven banish jealousy from the confines of the soul, producing what they have for all to see, treat it as common property, and give freely to the deserving.
קמ״ד
144[142] The fourth reason is, that the moon traverses the zodiac in a shorter fixed period than any other heavenly body. For it accomplishes that revolution in the span of a single month, and therefore the conclusion of its circuit, when the moon ends its course at the starting-point at which it began, is honoured by the law, which declares that day a feast, again to teach us an admirable lesson, that in the conduct of life we should make the ends correspond with the beginnings. And this will be effected if we keep our primitive appetites under the control of reason and do not permit them to rebel and riot like cattle that have no herdsman.
קמ״ה
145[143] As for the services that the moon renders to everything on earth, there is no need to dilate upon them. The proofs are perfectly clear. As the moon increases, the rivers and fountains rise, and again diminish as it diminishes. Its phases cause the seas to withdraw and dwindle at the ebbtide, then suddenly rush back with the returning flood, and the air to undergo all manner of changes as the sky becomes clear or cloudy and alters in other ways. The fruits, both of the sown crops and orchard-trees, grow to their maturity according to the revolutions of the moon, which fosters and ripens everything that grows with the dewy and very gentle breezes which it brings.
קמ״ו
146[144] But, as I have said, this is not the time to dwell at length on the praises of the moon and record and catalogue the services which it renders to living creatures and everything on earth. It is for these or similar reasons that the New Moon is honoured and obtains its place among the feasts.
קמ״ז
147[145] After the New Moon comes the fourth feast, called the Crossing-feast, which the Hebrews in their native tongue call Pascha. In this festival many myriads of victims from noon till eventide are offered by the whole people, old and young alike, raised for that particular day to the dignity of the priesthood. For at other times the priests according to the ordinance of the law carry out both the public sacrifices and those offered by private individuals. But on this occasion the whole nation performs the sacred rites and acts as priest with pure hands and complete immunity.
קמ״ח
148[146] The reason for this is as follows: the festival is a reminder and thank-offering for that great migration from Egypt which was made by more than two millions of men and women in obedience to the oracles vouchsafed to them. Now at that time they had left a land brimful of inhumanity which made a practice of expelling strangers, and what was worst of all, assigned divine honours to irrational creatures, not merely domesticated animals, but even wild beasts. So exceedingly joyful were they that in their vast enthusiasm and impatient eagerness, they naturally enough sacrificed without waiting for their priest. This practice which on that occasion was the result of a spontaneous and instinctive emotion, was sanctioned by the law once in every year to remind them of their duty of thanksgiving. These are the facts as discovered by the study of ancient history.
קמ״ט
149[147] But to those who are accustomed to turn literal facts into allegory, the Crossing-festival suggests the purification of the soul. They say that the lover of wisdom is occupied solely in crossing from the body and the passions, each of which overwhelms him like a torrent, unless the rushing current be dammed and held back by the principles of virtue.
ק״נ
150[148] On this day every dwelling-house is invested with the outward semblance and dignity of a temple. The victim is then slaughtered and dressed for the festal meal which befits the occasion. The guests assembled for the banquet have been cleansed by purificatory lustrations, and are there not as in other festive gatherings, to indulge the belly with wine and viands, but to fulfil with prayers and hymns the custom handed down by their fathers.
קנ״א
151[149] The day on which this national festivity occurs may very properly be noted. It is the 14th of the month, a number formed of the sum of two sevens, thus bringing out the fact that seven never fails to appear in anything worthy of honour but everywhere takes the lead in conferring prestige and dignity.
קנ״ב
152[150] With the Crossing-feast he combines one in which the food consumed is of a different and unfamiliar kind, namely, unleavened bread, which also gives its name to the feast. This may be regarded from two points of view, one peculiar to the nation, referring to the migration just mentioned, the other universal, following the lead of nature, and in agreement with the general cosmic order. To show that this affirmation is absolutely true, will require some examination. This month comes seventh in order and number as judged by the cycle of the sun, but in importance it is first, and therefore is described as first in the sacred books.
קנ״ג
153[151] The reason for this I believe to be as follows. In the spring equinox we have a kind of likeness and portraiture of that first epoch in which this world was created. The elements were then separated and placed in harmonious order with reference to themselves and each other. The heaven was adorned with sun and moon and the rhythmic movements and circlings of the other stars, both fixed and planetary. So too the earth was adorned with every manner of plants, and the uplands and lowlands, wherever the soil had depth and goodness, became luxuriant and verdant.
קנ״ד
154[152] So every year God reminds us of the creation of the world by setting before our eyes the spring when everything blooms and flowers. And therefore there is good reason for describing it in the laws as the first month because in a sense it is an image of the primal origin reproduced from it like the imprint from an archetypal seal.
קנ״ה
155[153] But the month of the autumnal equinox, though first in order as measured by the course of the sun, is not called first in the law, because at that time all the fruits have been gathered in and the trees are shedding their leaves and all the bloom which the spring brought in its prime already scorched by the heat of the summer sun is wilting under the dry currents of air.
קנ״ו
156[154] And so to give the name of “first” to a month in which both uplands and lowlands are sterilized and unfruitful seemed to him altogether unsuitable and incongruous. For things which come first and head the list should be associated with all the fairest and most desirable things which are the sources of birth and increase to animals and fruits and plants, not with the processes of destruction and the dark thoughts which it suggests.
קנ״ז
157[155] The feast begins at the middle of the month, on the fifteenth day, when the moon is full, a day purposely chosen because then there is no darkness, but everything is continuously lighted up as the sun shines from morning to evening and the moon from evening to morning and while the stars give place to each other no shadow is cast upon their brightness.
קנ״ח
158[156] Again, the feast is held for seven days to mark the precedence and honour which the number holds in the universe, indicating that nothing which tends to cheerfulness and public mirth and thankfulness to God should fail to be accompanied with memories of the sacred seven which He intended to be the source and fountain to men of all good things.
קנ״ט
159[157] Two days out of the seven, the first and the last, are declared holy. In this way he gave a natural precedence to the beginning and the end; but he also wished to create a harmony as on a musical instrument between the intermediates and the extremes. Perhaps too he wished to harmonize the feast with a past which adjoins the first day and a future which adjoins the last. These two, the first and the last, have each the other’s properties in addition to their own. The first is the beginning of the feast and the end of the preceding past, the seventh is the end of the feast and the beginning of the coming future. Thus, as I have said before, the whole life of the man of worth may be regarded as equivalent to a feast held by one who has expelled grief and fear and desire and the other passions and distempers of the soul.
ק״ס
160[158] The bread is unleavened either because our forefathers, when under divine guidance they were starting on their migration, were so intensely hurried that they brought the lumps of dough unleavened, or else because at that season, namely, the springtime, when the feast is held, the fruit of the corn has not reached its perfection, for the fields are in the ear stage and not yet mature for harvest. It was the imperfection of this fruit which belonged to the future, though it was to reach its perfection very shortly, that he considered might be paralleled by the unleavened food, which is also imperfect, and serves to remind us of the comforting hope that nature, possessing as she does a superabundant wealth of things needful, is already preparing her yearly gifts to the human race.
קס״א
161[159] Another suggestion made by the interpreters of the holy scriptures is that food, when unleavened, is a gift of nature, when leavened is a work of art. For men in their eagerness to temper the barely necessary with the pleasant, have learned through practice to soften by art what nature has made hard.
קס״ב
162[160] Since, then, the spring-time feast, as I have laid down, is a reminder of the creation of the world, and its earliest inhabitants, children of earth in the first or second generation, must have used the gifts of the universe in their unperverted state before pleasure had got the mastery, he ordained for use on this occasion the food most fully in accordance with the season. He wished every year to rekindle the embers of the serious and ascetic mode of faring, and to employ the leisure of a festal assembly to confer admiration and honour on the old-time life of frugality and economy, and as far as possible to assimilate our present-day life to that of the distant past.
קס״ג
163[161] These statements are especially guaranteed by the exposure of the twelve loaves corresponding in number to the tribes, on the holy table. They are all unleavened, the clearest possible example of a food free from admixture, in the preparation of which art for the sake of pleasure has no place, but only nature, providing nothing save what is indispensable for its use. So much for this.
קס״ד
164[162] But within the feast there is another feast following directly after the first day. This is called the “Sheaf,” a name given to it from the ceremony which consists in bringing to the altar a sheaf as a first-fruit, both of the land which has been given to the nation to dwell in and of the whole earth, so that it serves that purpose both to the nation in particular and for the whole human race in general.
קס״ה
165[163] The reason of this is that the Jewish nation is to the whole inhabited world what the priest is to the State. For the holy office in very truth belongs to the nation because it carries out all the rites of purification and both in body and soul obeys the injunctions of the divine laws, which restrict the pleasures of the belly and the parts below it and the horde … setting reason to guide the irrational senses, and also check and rein in the wild and extravagant impulses of the soul, sometimes through gentler remonstrances and philosophical admonitions, sometimes through severer and more forcible condemnations and the fear of punishment which they hold over it as a deterrent.
קס״ו
166[164] But not only is the legislation in a sense a lesson on the sacred office, not only does a life led in conformity with the laws necessarily confer priesthood or rather high priesthood in the judgement of truth, but there is another point of special importance. There is no bound or limit to the number of deities, male and female, honoured in different cities, the vain inventions of the tribe of poets and of the great multitude of men to whom the quest for truth is a task of difficulty and beyond their powers of research. Yet instead of all peoples having the same gods, we find different nations venerating and honouring different gods. The gods of the foreigner they do not regard as gods at all. They treat their acceptance by the others as a jest and a laughing-stock and denounce the extreme folly of those who honour them and the failure to think soundly shewn thereby.
קס״ז
167[165] But if He exists Whom all Greeks and barbarians unanimously acknowledge, the supreme Father of gods and men and the Maker of the whole universe, whose nature is invisible and inscrutable not only by the eye, but by the mind, yet is a matter into which every student of astronomical science and other philosophy desires to make research and leaves nothing untried which would help him to discern it and do it service—then it was the duty of all men to cleave to Him and not introduce new gods staged as by machinery to receive the same honours.
קס״ח
168[166] When they went wrong in what was the most vital matter of all, it is the literal truth that the error which the rest committed was corrected by the Jewish nation which passed over all created objects because they were created and naturally liable to destruction and chose the service only of the Uncreated and Eternal, first because of its excellence, secondly because it is profitable to dedicate and attach ourselves to the elder rather than to the younger, to the ruler rather than to the subject, to the maker rather than to the thing created.
קס״ט
169[167] And therefore it astonishes me to see that some people venture to accuse of inhumanity the nation which has shewn so profound a sense of fellowship and goodwill to all men everywhere, by using its prayers and festivals and first-fruit offerings as a means of supplication for the human race in general and of making its homage to the truly existent God in the name of those who have evaded the service which it was their duty to give, as well as of itself.
ק״ע
170[168] So much for this feast as a thanksgiving for the whole human race. But the nation in particular also gives thanks for many reasons. First, because they do not continue for ever wandering broadcast over islands and continents and occupying the homelands of others as strangers and vagrants, open to the reproach of waiting to seize the goods of others. Nor have they just borrowed a section of this great country for lack of means to purchase, but have acquired the land and cities for their own property, a heritage in which they live as long established citizens and therefore offer first-fruits from it as a sacred duty.
קע״א
171[169] Secondly, the land which has fallen to their lot is not derelict nor indifferent soil, but good land, well fitted for breeding domestic animals and bearing fruits in vast abundance. For in it there is no poverty of soil and even such parts as seem to be stony or stubborn are intersected by soft veins of very great depth, the richness of which adapts them for producing life.
קע״ב
172[170] But besides this it was no uninhabited land which they received, but one which contained a populous nation and great cities filled with stalwart citizens. Yet these cities have been stripped of their inhabitants and the whole nation, except for a small fraction, has disappeared, partly through wars, partly through heaven-sent visitations, a consequence of their strange and monstrous practices of iniquity and all their heinous acts of impiety aimed at the subversion of the statutes of nature. Thus should those who took their place as inhabitants gain instruction from the evil fate of others and learn from their history the lesson that if they emulate deeds of vice they will suffer the same doom, but if they pay honour to a life of virtue they will possess the heritage appointed to them and be ranked not as settlers but as native-born.
קע״ג
173[171] We have shewn, then, that the Sheaf was an offering both of the nation’s own land and of the whole earth, given in thanks for the fertility and abundance which the nation and the whole human race desired to enjoy. But we must not fail to note that there are many things of great advantage represented by the offering. First, that we remember God, and what thing more perfectly good can we find than this? Secondly, that we make a requital, as is most fully due, to Him Who is the true cause of the good harvest.
קע״ד
174[172] For the results due to the husbandman’s art are few or as good as nothing, furrows drawn, a plant dug or ringed around, a trench deepened, excessive overgrowth lopped, or other similar operations. But what we owe to nature is all indispensable and useful, a soil of great fruitfulness, fields irrigated by fountains or rivers, spring-fed or winter torrents, and watered by seasonable rains, happily tempered states of the air which sends us the breath of its truly life-giving breezes, numberless varieties of crops and plants. For which of these has man for its inventor or parent?
קע״ה
175[173] No, it is nature, their parent, who has not grudged to man a share in the goods which are her very own, but judging him to be the chiefest of mortal animals because he has obtained a portion of reason and good sense, chose him as the worthiest and invited him to share what was hers to give. For all this it is meet and right that the hospitality of God should be praised and revered, God Who provides for His guests the whole earth as a truly hospitable home ever filled not merely with necessaries, but with the means of luxurious living.
קע״ו
176[174] Further, we learn not to neglect benefactors, for he who is grateful to God, Who needs nothing and is His own fullness, will thus become accustomed to be grateful to men whose needs are numberless.
קע״ז
177[175] The sheaf thus offered is of barley, shewing that the use of the inferior grains is not open to censure. It would be irreverent to give first-fruits of them all, as most of them are made to give pleasure rather than to be used as necessaries, and equally unlawful to enjoy and partake of any form of food for which thanks had not been offered in the proper and rightful manner. And therefore the law ordained that the first-fruit offerings should be made of barley, a species of grain regarded as holding the second place in value as food. For wheat holds the first place and as the first-fruit of this has greater distinction, the law postponed it to a more suitable season in the future. It does not anticipate matters, but puts it in storage for the time being, so that the various thank-offerings may be adjusted to their appointed dates as they recur.
קע״ח
178[176] The festival of the Sheaf, which has all these grounds of precedence, indicated in the law, is also in fact anticipatory of another greater feast. For it is from it that the fiftieth day is reckoned, by counting seven sevens, which are then crowned with the sacred number by the monad, which is an incorporeal image of God, Whom it resembles because it also stands alone. This is the primary excellence exhibited by fifty, but there is another which should be mentioned.
קע״ט
179[177] One reason among others which makes its nature so marvellous and admirable is that it is formed by what the mathematicians tell us is the most elemental and venerable of existing things, namely, the right-angled triangle. In length its sides are 5, 3, 4, of which the sum is twelve, the pattern of the zodiac cycle, the duplication of the highly prolific six, which is the starting-point of perfection since it is the sum of the factors which produce it through multiplication. But we find that the sides when raised to the second power, i.e. 3 × 3 + 4 × 4 + 5 × 5, make 50, so that we must say that 50 is superior to 12 in the same degree as the second power is superior to the first.
ק״פ
180[178] And if the lesser of these is represented by the most excellent of the heavenly spheres, the zodiac, the greater, namely 50, must be the pattern of some quite superior form of existence. But a discussion of this would be out of place at this point. It is quite enough for the present to call attention to the difference, so as to avoid treating a prominent fact as of secondary importance.
קפ״א
181[179] The feast which is held when the number 50 is reached has acquired the title of “first-products.” On it it is the custom to bring two leavened loaves of wheaten bread for a sample offering of that kind of grain as the best form of food. One explanation of the name, “Feast of First-products,” is that the first produce of the young wheat and the earliest fruit to appear is brought as a sample offering before the year’s harvest comes to be used by men.
קפ״ב
182[180] It is no doubt just and a religious duty that those who have received freely a generous supply of sustenance so necessary and wholesome and also palatable in the highest degree should not enjoy or taste it at all until they have brought a sample offering to the Donor, not indeed as a gift, for all things and possessions and gifts are His, but as a token, however small, by which they show a disposition of thankfulness and loyalty to Him Who, while He needs no favours, sends the showers of His favours in never-failing constancy.
קפ״ג
183[181] Another reason for the name may be that wheaten grain is pre-eminent as the first and best product, all the other sown crops ranking in the second class in comparison; for as an archon in a city or a pilot in a ship are said to be the first because they regulate the course of the city or the ship, as the case may be, so wheaten grain has received the compound name of “first-product” because it is the best of all the cereals, which it would not be, unless it were also the food used by the best of living creatures.
קפ״ד
184[182] The loaves are leavened in spite of the prohibition against bringing leaven to the altar, not to produce any contradiction in the ordinances, but to ensure that so to speak there shall be a single kind, both for receiving and giving. By receiving I mean the thanksgiving of the offerers, by giving the immediate return without any delay to the offerers of what they bring, though not for their own use.
קפ״ה
185[183] For food that has once been consecrated will be used by those who have the right and authority, and that right belongs to those who act as priests who through the beneficence of the law have the right to partake of any thing brought to the altar which is not consumed by the undying fire—a privilege granted either as a payment for officiating or as a prize for the contests which they endure in the cause of piety, or a sacred allotment in lieu of land, in the apportionment of which they had not received their proper share like the other tribes.
קפ״ו
186[184] But leaven is also a symbol for two other things: in one way it stands for food in its most complete and perfect form, such that in our daily usage none is found to be superior or more nourishing, and as wheat-meal is superior to that of the other seed crops, its excellence demands that the offering made in recognition of it should be of the same high quality.
קפ״ז
187[185] The other point is more symbolical. Everything that is leavened rises, and joy is the rational elevation or rising of the soul. And there is nothing that exists which more naturally gives a man joy than the possession in generous abundance of necessaries. Such rightly call forth gladness and thanksgiving in those who by the leavened loaves give outward expression to the invisible sense of well-being in their hearts.
קפ״ח
188[186] The offering takes the form of loaves instead of wheaten meal, because when the wheat has come there is nothing still missing in the way of appetizing food. For we are told that of all the seed crops, wheat is the last to spring up and be ready for harvesting.
קפ״ט
189[187] And these thank-offerings of the best kind are two in number for the two kinds of time, the past and the future; for the past, because our days have been spent in abundance, free from the experience of the evils of want and famine; for the future, because we have laid by and prepared resources to meet it, and are full of bright hopes while we dispense and bring out for daily use the gifts of God as they are needed by the rules of good economy.
ק״צ
190[188] Next comes the opening of the sacred month, when it is customary to sound the trumpet in the temple at the same time that the sacrifices are brought there, and its name of “trumpet feast” is derived from this. It has a twofold significance, partly to the nation in particular, partly to all mankind in general. In the former sense it is a reminder of a mighty and marvellous event which came to pass when the oracles of the law were given from above.
קצ״א
191[189] For then the sound of the trumpet pealed from heaven and reached, we may suppose, the ends of the universe, so that the event might strike terror even into those who were far from the spot and dwelling well nigh at the extremities of the earth, who would come to the natural conclusion that such mighty signs portended mighty consequences. And indeed what could men receive mightier or more profitable than the general laws which came from the mouth of God, not like the particular laws, through an interpreter?
קצ״ב
192[190] This is a significance peculiar to the nation. What follows is common to all mankind. The trumpet is the instrument used in war, both to sound the advance against the enemy when the moment comes for engaging battle and also for recalling the troops when they have to separate and return to their respective camps. And there is another war not of human agency when nature is at strife in herself, when her parts make onslaught one on another and her law-abiding sense of equality is vanquished by the greed for inequality.
קצ״ג
193[191] Both these wars work destruction on the face of the earth. The enemy cut down the fruit-trees, ravage the country, set fire to the foodstuffs and the ripening ears of corn in the open fields, while the forces of nature use drought, rainstorms, violent moisture-laden winds, scorching sun-rays, intense cold accompanied by snow, with the regular harmonious alternations of the yearly seasons turned into disharmony, a state of things in my opinion due to the impiety which does not gain a gradual hold but comes rushing with the force of a torrent among those whom these things befall.
קצ״ד
194[192] And therefore the law instituted this feast figured by that instrument of war the trumpet, which gives it its name, to be as a thank-offering to God the peace-maker and peace-keeper, Who destroys faction both in cities and in the various parts of the universe and creates plenty and fertility and abundance of other good things and leaves the havoc of fruits without a single spark to be rekindled.
קצ״ה
195[193] The next feast held after the “Trumpets” is the Fast. Perhaps some of the perversely minded who are not ashamed to censure things excellent will say, What sort of a feast is this in which there are no gatherings to eat and drink, no company of entertainers or entertained, no copious supply of strong drink nor tables sumptuously furnished, nor a generous display of all the accompaniments of a public banquet, nor again the merriment and revelry with frolic and drollery, nor dancing to the sound of flute and harp and timbrels and cymbals, and the other instruments of the debilitated and invertebrate kind of music which through the channel of the ears awaken the unruly lusts?
קצ״ו
196[194] For it is in these and through these that men, in their ignorance of what true merriment is, consider that the merriment of a feast is to be found. This the clear-seeing eyes of Moses the ever wise discerned and therefore he called the fast a feast, the greatest of the feasts, in his native tongue a Sabbath of Sabbaths, or as the Greeks would say, a seven of sevens, a holier than the holy. He gave it this name for many reasons.
קצ״ז
197[195] First, because of the self-restraint which it entails; always and everywhere indeed he exhorted them to shew this in all the affairs of life, in controlling the tongue and the belly and the organs below the belly, but on this occasion especially he bids them do honour to it by dedicating thereto a particular day. To one who has learnt to disregard food and drink which are absolutely necessary, are there any among the superfluities of life which he can fail to despise, things which exist to promote not so much preservation and permanence of life as pleasure with all its powers of mischief?
קצ״ח
198[196] Secondly, because the holy-day is entirely devoted to prayers and supplications, and men from morn to eve employ their leisure in nothing else but offering petitions of humble entreaty in which they seek earnestly to propitiate God and ask for remission of their sins, voluntary and involuntary, and entertain bright hopes looking not to their own merits but to the gracious nature of Him Who sets pardon before chastisement.
קצ״ט
199[197] Thirdly, because of the time at which the celebration of the fast occurs, namely, that when all the annual fruits of the earth have been gathered in. To eat and drink of these without delay would, he held, shew gluttony, but to fast and refrain from taking them as food shews the perfect piety which teaches the mind not to put trust in what stands ready prepared before us as though it were the source of health and life. For often its presence proves injurious and its absence beneficial.
ר׳
200[198] Those who abstain from food and drink after the ingathering of the fruits cry aloud to us with their souls, and though their voices utter no sound, their language could hardly be plainer. They say, “We have gladly received and are storing the boons of nature, yet we do not ascribe our preservation to any corruptible thing, but to God the Parent and Father and Saviour of the world and all that is therein, Who has the power and the right to nourish and sustain us by means of these or without these.
ר״א
201[199] See, for example, how the many thousands of our forefathers as they traversed the trackless and all-barren desert, were for forty years, the life of a generation, nourished by Him as in a land of richest and most fertile soil; how He opened fountains unknown before to give them abundance of drink for their use; how He rained food from heaven, neither more nor less than what sufficed for each day, that they might consume what they needed without hoarding, nor barter for the prospect of soulless stores their hopes of His goodness, but taking little thought of the bounties received rather reverence and worship the bountiful Giver and honour Him with the hymns and benedictions that are His due.”
ר״ב
202[200] By order of the law the fast is held on the tenth day. Why on the tenth? As has been shewn in our detailed discussion of that number, it is called by the learned the all-perfect, and embraces all the progressions, arithmetical, harmonic and geometrical, and further the harmonies, the fourth, the fifth, the octave and the double octave, representing respectively the ratios 4:3, 3:2, 2:1 and 4:1, and it also contains the ratio of 9:8, so that it sums up fully and perfectly the leading truths of musical science, and for this reason it has received its name of the all-perfect.
ר״ג
203[201] In ordaining that this privation of food and drink should be based on the full and perfect number 10, he intended to prescribe the best possible form of nourishment for the best part of us. He did not wish anyone to suppose that as their instructor in the mysteries he was advocating starvation, the most intolerable of sufferings, but only a brief stoppage in the influx which passes into the receptacles of the body.
ר״ד
204[202] For this would ensure that the stream from the fountain of reason should flow pure and crystal-clear with smooth course into the soul, because the constantly repeated administrations of food which submerge the body sweep the reason away as well, whereas if they are checked, that same reason stoutly fortified can in pursuit of all that is worth seeing and hearing make its way without stumbling as upon a dry firm causeway.
ר״ה
205[203] Besides, it was meet and right when everything has shewn abundance as they would have it, and they enjoy a full and perfect measure of goodness, that amid this prosperity and lavish supply of boons, they should by abstaining from food and drink remind themselves of what it is to want, and offer prayers and supplications, on the one hand to ask that they may never really experience the lack of necessities, on the other to express their thankfulness because in such wealth of blessings they remember the ills they have been spared. Enough on this matter.
ר״ו
206[204] The last of the annual feasts, called Tabernacles, recurs at the autumn equinox. From this we may draw two morals. The first is, that we should honour equality and hate inequality, for the former is the source and fountain of justice, the latter of injustice. The former is akin to open sunlight, the latter to darkness. The second moral is, that after all the fruits are made perfect, it is our duty to thank God Who brought them to perfection and is the source of all good things.
ר״ז
207[205] For autumn, or after-fruitage, is, as also the name clearly implies, the season after the ripe fruit has been gathered in, when the sown crops and the fruit-trees have paid their annual toll and bounden tribute, and the land has richly provided all that it yields for the sustenance of the various kinds of animals without number, both tame and wild, sustenance not only to be enjoyed on the spot and for the moment, but also in the future, through the foresight of nature, the friend of all that lives.
ר״ח
208[206] Further, the people are commanded, during the time of the feast, to dwell in tents. The reason of this may be that the labour of the husbandmen no longer requires that they should live in the open air, as nothing is now left unprotected but all the fruits are stored in silos or similar places to escape the damage which often ensues through the blazing sunshine or storms of rain.
ר״ט
209[207] For when the crops which feed us are standing in the open field, you can only watch and guard the food so necessary to you, by coming out and not shutting yourself up like a woman who never stirs outside her quarters. And if while you remain in the open air you encounter extreme cold or heat, you have the thick growth of the trees waiting to shade you, and sheltered under them you can easily escape injury from either source. But when all the fruits are being gathered in, come in yourself also to seek a more weatherproof mode of life and hope for rest in place of the toils which you endured when labouring on the land.
ר״י
210Another reason may be, that it should remind us of the long journeyings of our forefathers in the depths of the desert, when at every halting-place they spent many a year in tents.
רי״א
211[208] And indeed it is well in wealth to remember your poverty, in distinction your insignificance, in high offices your position as a commoner, in peace your dangers in war, on land the storms on sea, in cities the life of loneliness. For there is no pleasure greater than in high prosperity to call to mind old misfortunes.
רי״ב
212[209] But besides giving pleasure, it is a considerable help in the practice of virtue. For people who having had both good and ill before their eyes have rejected the ill and are enjoying the good, necessarily fall into a grateful frame of mind and are urged to piety by the fear of a change to the reverse, and also therefore in thankfulness for their present blessings they honour God with songs and words of praise and beseech Him and propitiate Him with supplications that they may never repeat the experience of such evils.
רי״ג
213[210] Again, the beginning of this feast comes on the fifteenth day of the month for the same reason as was given when we were speaking of the season of spring, namely that the glorious light which nature gives should fill the universe not only by day but also by night, because on that day the sun and moon rise in succession to each other with no interval between their shining, which is not divided by any borderland of darkness.
רי״ד
214[211] As a crown to the seven days he adds an eighth, which he calls the “closing,” not meaning apparently that it is the closing of that feast only, but also of all the yearly feasts which I have enumerated and described. For it is the last in the year and forms its conclusion.
רי״ה
215[212] Perhaps also the number eight, the first cubic number, was assigned to the feast for the following reason: it is the beginning of the higher category of solids, marking where we pass from the unsubstantial and bring to its conclusion the category of the conceptual which rises to the solid in the scale of ascending powers.
רי״ו
216[213] And indeed the autumn festival, being as I have said a sort of complement and conclusion of all the feasts in the year, seems to have more stability and fixity, because the people have now received their returns from the land and are no longer perplexed and terrified by doubts as to its fertility or barrenness. For the anxious thoughts of the husbandman are never settled till the crops are gathered in, so numberless are the men and animals from whom they are liable to suffer harm.
רי״ז
217[214] All this long exposition is due to my regard for the sacred seventh day, and my wish to shew that all the yearly feasts prove to be as it were the children of that number which stands as a mother … scenes of folly and joy … and because the festal assemblies and the cheerful life which they afford bring delights that are free from all anxiety and dejection, and spread exhilaration both in the body and in the soul, in the body by the comfortable way of living, in the soul by the study of philosophy.
רי״ח
218[215] But besides these we have what is not a feast, but is a general ceremony of a festal character called the Basket, a name which describes what takes place, as we shall shortly shew. That it has not the prestige and standing of a feast is clear for many reasons. For it does not affect the nation as a united whole like each of the others, nor do we find any victim being brought or led to the altar and then sacrificed and given over to be consumed by the sacred and unquenchable fire, nor is there any specified number of days during which the feast is to last.
רי״ט
219[216] But that it has a festal character and nearly approaches the form of a general ceremony can be easily seen. For every person who possesses farms or landed estates takes some of every kind of fruit and fills receptacles which, as I have said, are called baskets, and brings them with joy as a sample offering of his rich fruit-harvest, to the temple, and there standing opposite the altar, gives them to the priest. Meanwhile he recites this beautiful and admirable canticle, or if he does not remember it, he listens with all attention while the priest repeats it.
ר״כ
220[217] The sense of this canticle is as follows: “The founders of our race abandoned Syria and migrated to Egypt and, though few in number, increased to a populous nation. Their descendants suffered wrongs without number from the inhabitants, and when no further assistance from men appeared forthcoming, became suppliants of God and sought refuge in His help.
רכ״א
221[218] He Who is kindly to all the wronged accepted their supplication and confounded their assailants with signs and wonders and portents and all the other marvels that were wrought at that time, and saved the victims of outrage who were suffering all that malice could devise, and not only brought them forth into freedom, but gave them a land fertile in every way.
רכ״ב
222[219] Of the fruits of this land we present a sample offering to Thee, our Benefactor, if indeed we may speak of presenting that which we receive. For all these things, good Master, are Thy boons and gifts, and as Thou hast judged us worthy of them, we take pride and delight in the unexpected blessings which Thou hast given us beyond all our hopes.”
רכ״ג
223[220] This canticle is used continually by a succession of worshippers from early summer to late autumn, through the two seasons which constitute a complete half of the year. For the whole population cannot in a body bring the fruits of the season at a fixed time, but must do so at different times, and this may even be the case with the same persons coming from the same places.
רכ״ד
224[221] For since some of the fruits ripen more quickly than others, both because of the difference of the situation which may be warmer or colder, and for a multitude of other reasons, naturally the time when this sample of the fruits is due cannot be exactly defined or limited, but extends over a very considerable period.
רכ״ה
225[222] These offerings are assigned for the use of the priests, because they have no territory allotted to them, nor property which brings them income, and their heritage consists of the offerings of the nation in return for the religious duties imposed upon them by night and day.
רכ״ו
226[223] I have now completed the discussion of the number seven and of matters connected with days and months and years that have reference to that number, and also of the feasts which are associated with it. In this I have followed the order of the principal heads set before us as the sequence of the subjects demanded. I now proceed to the next head, in which we find recorded a statement of the honour due to parents.
רכ״ז
227[224] In my previous remarks I have sketched the four divisions which both in order and importance stand undoubtedly first. They comprise the assertion of the absolute sovereignty by which the universe is governed, the prohibition against making any image or likeness of God and against perjury or vain swearing in general and the doctrine of the sacred seventh day, all of them tending to promote piety and religion. I now proceed to the fifth, which states the duty of honouring parents, a matter which, as I have shewn in the discussion devoted to this in particular, stands on the border-line between the human and the divine.
רכ״ח
228[225] For parents are midway between the natures of God and man, and partake of both; the human obviously because they have been born and will perish, the divine because they have brought others to the birth and have raised not-being into being. Parents, in my opinion, are to their children what God is to the world, since just as He achieved existence for the non-existent, so they in imitation of His power, as far as they are capable, immortalize the race.
רכ״ט
229[226] And a father and mother deserve honour, not only on this account, but for many other reasons. For in the judgement of those who take account of virtue, seniors are placed above juniors, teachers above pupils, benefactors above beneficiaries, rulers above subjects, and masters above servants.
ר״ל
230[227] Now parents are assigned a place in the higher of these two orders, for they are seniors and instructors and benefactors and rulers and masters: sons and daughters are placed in the lower order, for they are juniors and learners and recipients of benefits and subjects and servants.
רל״א
231That none of these statements is false is self-evident, but logical proofs will ratify their truth still further.
רל״ב
232[228] I say, then, that the maker is always senior to the thing made and the cause to its effect, and the begetters are in a sense the causes and the creators of what they beget. They are also in the position of instructors because they impart to their children from their earliest years everything that they themselves may happen to know, and give them instruction not only in the various branches of knowledge which they impress upon their young minds, but also on the most essential questions of what to choose and avoid, namely, to choose virtues and avoid vices and the activities to which they lead.
רל״ג
233[229] Further, who could be more truly called benefactors than parents in relation to their children? First, they have brought them out of non-existence; then, again, they have held them entitled to nurture and later to education of body and soul, so that they may have not only life, but a good life.
רל״ד
234[230] They have benefited the body by means of the gymnasium and the training there given, through which it gains muscular vigour and good condition and the power to bear itself and move with an ease marked by gracefulness and elegance. They have done the same for the soul by means of letters and arithmetic and geometry and music and philosophy as a whole which lifts on high the mind lodged within the mortal body and escorts it to the very heaven and shews it the blessed and happy beings that dwell therein, and creates in it an eager longing for the unswerving ever-harmonious order which they never forsake because they obey their captain and marshal.
רל״ה
235[231] But in addition to the benefits they confer, parents have also received authority over their offspring. That authority is not obtained by lot nor voting as it is in the cities, where it may be alleged that the lot is due to a blunder of fortune in which reason has no place, and the voting to the impetuosity of the mob, always so reckless and devoid of circumspection, but is awarded by the most admirable and perfect judgement of nature above us which governs with justice things both human and divine.
רל״ו
236[232] And therefore fathers have the right to upbraid their children and admonish them severely and if they do not submit to threats conveyed in words to beat and degrade them and put them in bonds. And further if in the face of this they continue to rebel, and carried away by their incorrigible depravity refuse the yoke, the law permits the parents to extend the punishment to death, though here it requires more than the father alone or the mother alone. So great a penalty should be the sentence, not only of one of them but of both. For it is not to be expected that both the parents would agree to the execution of their son unless the weight of his offences depressed the scale strongly enough to overcome the affection which nature has firmly established in them.
רל״ז
237[233] But parents have not only been given the right of exercising authority over their children, but the power of a master corresponding to the two primary forms under which servants are owned, one when they are home-bred, the other when they are purchased. For parents pay out a sum many times the value of a slave on their children and for them to nurses, tutors and teachers, apart from the cost of their clothes, food and superintendence in sickness and health from their earliest years until they are full grown. “Homebred” too must they be who are not only born in the house but through the masters of the house, who have made the contribution enforced by the statutes of nature in giving them birth.
רל״ח
238[234] With all these facts before them, they do not do anything deserving of praise who honour their parents, since any one of the considerations mentioned is in itself quite a sufficient call to shew reverence. And on the contrary, they deserve blame and obloquy and extreme punishment who do not respect them as seniors nor listen to them as instructors nor feel the duty of requiting them as benefactors nor obey them as rulers nor fear them as masters.
רל״ט
239[235] Honour therefore, he says, next to God thy father and thy mother, who are crowned with a laurel of the second rank assigned to them by nature, the arbitress of the contest. And in no way wilt thou honour them as well as by trying both to be good and to seem good, to be good by seeking virtue simple and unfeigned, to seem good by seeking it accompanied by a reputation for worth and the praise of those around you.
ר״מ
240[236] For parents have little thought for their own personal interests and find the consummation of happiness in the high excellence of their children, and to gain this the children will be willing to hearken to their commands and to obey them in everything that is just and profitable; for the true father will give no instruction to his son that is foreign to virtue.
רמ״א
241[237] But the proof of filial piety may be given not only in the ways above mentioned, but also by courtesy shewn to persons who share the seniority of the parents. One who pays respect to an aged man or woman who is not of his kin may be regarded as having remembrance of his father and mother. He looks to them as prototypes and stands in awe of those who bear their image.
רמ״ב
242[238] And therefore in the Holy Scriptures the young are commanded not only to yield the chief seats to the aged but also to give place to them as they pass, in reverence for the grey hairs that mark the age to which they may hope to attain who judge it worthy of precedence.
רמ״ג
243[239] Admirable too, as it seems to me, is that other ordinance where he says, “Let each fear his father and mother.” Here he sets fear before affection, not as better in every way, but as more serviceable and profitable for the occasion which he has before him. For in the first place, persons subject to instruction and admonition are in fact wanting in sense, and want of sense is only cured by fear. Secondly, it would not be suitable to include in the enactments of a lawgiver an instruction on the duty of filial affection, for nature has implanted this as an imperative instinct from the very cradle in the souls of those who are thus united by kinship.
רמ״ד
244[240] And therefore he omitted any mention of love for parents because it is learned and taught by instinct and requires no injunction, but did enjoin fear for the sake of those who are in the habit of neglecting their duty. For when parents cherish their children with extreme tenderness, providing them with good gifts from every quarter and shunning no toil or danger because they are fast bound to them by the magnetic forces of affection, there are some who do not receive this exceeding tenderheartedness in a way that profits them. They pursue eagerly luxury and voluptuousness, they applaud the dissolute life, they run to waste both in body and soul, and suffer no part of either to be kept erect by its proper faculties which they lay prostrate and paralyzed without a blush because they have never feared the censors they possess in their fathers and mothers but give in to and indulge their own lusts.
רמ״ה
245[241] But these parents also must be exhorted to employ more active and severe admonitions to cure the wastage of their children, and the children also that they may stand in awe of those who begot them, fearing them both as rulers and masters. For only so, and that hardly, will they shrink from wrongdoing.
רמ״ו
246[242] I have now discussed the five heads of the laws belonging to the first table, and all the particular enactments which may be classed under each of the five. But I must also state the penalties decreed for transgression of them.
רמ״ז
247[243] The result of the close affinity which the offences have to each other is that they all have a common punishment, namely, death, but there are different reasons for this punishment. We should begin with the last commandment, on the behaviour due to parents, since our discussion of it is fresh in our minds. He says “if anyone strikes his father or mother, let him be stoned.” This is quite just, for justice forbids that he should live who maltreats the authors of his life.
רמ״ח
248[244] But some dignitaries and legislators who had an eye to men’s opinions rather than to truth, have decreed that striking a father should be punished by cutting off the hands, a specious refinement due to their wish to win the approval of the more careless or thoughtless, who think that the parts with which the offenders have struck their parents should be amputated.
רמ״ט
249[245] But it is silly to visit displeasure on the servants rather than on the actual authors, for the outrage is not committed by the hands but by the persons who used their hands to commit it, and it is these persons who must be punished. Otherwise, when one man has killed another with a sword, we should cast the sword out of the land and let the murderer go free, and conversely, honour should be given, not to those who have distinguished themselves in war, but to the lifeless equipments and weapons which were the instruments of their exploits.
ר״נ
250[246] In the case of the victors in the athletic contests, whether at the single or the double course or the long race or the boxing or the general contest, will they try to garland the legs and hands only and disregard the bodies of the athletes as a whole? It would surely be ridiculous to introduce such practices and give to the indispensable accompaniments the punishments or honours which should be given to the responsible persons. For similarly, in musical exhibitions, when anyone makes a highly successful performance on the flute or lyre, we do not pass him by and adjudge the laudatory announcements and honours to the instruments.
רנ״א
251[247] Why then, you grand legislators, should we cut off the hands of those who strike a father? Or is your object that the offenders, besides being quite useless, may levy a tribute not annually, but daily, on those whom they have wronged, because they are unable to provide the sustenance they need. For no father is so iron-hearted as to allow his son to starve to death, particularly as his anger grows faint as time goes on.
רנ״ב
252[248] And even if while making no assault with his hands he uses abusive language to those to whom good words are owed as a bounden duty, or in any other way does anything to dishonour his parents, let him die. He is the common and indeed the national enemy of all. For who could find kindness from him who is not kind even to the authors of his life, through whom he has come into existence and to whom he is but a supplement?
רנ״ג
253[249] Again, let him who has turned the sacred seventh day into a profane thing, as far as lies in his power, be sentenced to death. For on the contrary we ought to be rich in ways of purifying things profane, both material and immaterial, to change them for the better, since, as it has been said, “envy has no place in the divine choir.” But to dare to debase and deface the stamp of things consecrated shews the utmost height of impiety.
רנ״ד
254[250] There is an incident which occurred during the great migration from Egypt in ancient days while the whole multitude was journeying through the pathless wilderness. The seventh day had come, and all those myriads, how numerous I have stated in an earlier place, were staying very quietly in their tents, when a single person of a rank by no means mean or insignificant, regardless of the orders given and mocking at those who maintained them, went out to gather firewood, but actually succeeded in displaying his disobedience to the law.
רנ״ה
255[251] He returned bringing an armful, but the others, pouring out from the tents, though greatly enraged if repelled from violence on account of the sanctity of the day, took him to the ruler and reported the impious deed. The ruler put him in custody, but when the divine pronouncement had been given out that he should be stoned, he surrendered him to those who had first seen him to be done to death. For the prohibition against lighting a fire on the seventh day, the reason for which I have stated earlier, applies equally, I presume, to collecting the means for kindling fire.
רנ״ו
256[252] For persons who call God to witness to an untruth, death is the appointed punishment, quite rightly. For not even a man, if he is of a decent sort, will tolerate an invitation to join in subscribing to an untruth, but would in my opinion regard anyone who urged him to this course as an enemy unfit to be trusted.
רנ״ז
257[253] And therefore we must declare that God, though His nature is to be merciful, will never free from guilt him who swears falsely to an injustice, a miscreant almost beyond possibility of purification, even if he evades the chastisements of men. And these he will never escape; for there are thousands who have their eyes upon him full of zeal for the laws, strictest guardians of the ancestral institutions, merciless to those who do anything to subvert them. Otherwise we must suppose that while it is right to seek the death of one who dishonours a father or a mother, more moderation should be shewn when impious men dishonour the name which is more glorious than majesty itself.
רנ״ח
258[254] Yet none is so foolish as to visit the lesser offences with death and spare those who are guilty of the greater; and the sacrilege involved in reviling or outraging parents is not so great as that committed by perjury against the sacred title of God.
רנ״ט
259[255] But if he who swears a wrongful oath is guilty, how great a punishment does he deserve who denies the truly existing God and honours created beings before their Maker, and thinks fit to revere, not only earth or water or air or fire, the elements of the All, or again the sun and moon and planets and fixed stars, or the whole heaven and universe, but also the works of mortal craftsmen, stocks and stones, which they have fashioned into human shape?
ר״ס
260[256] And therefore let him too himself be made like unto these works of men’s hands. For it is right that he who honours lifeless things should have no part in life, especially if he has become a disciple of Moses and has often heard from his prophetic lips those most holy and godly instructions, “Do not admit the name of other gods into thy soul to remember it, nor give expression to it with thy voice. Keep both thy mind and thy speech far apart from these others, and turn to the Father and Maker of all, that thy conceptions of His sole sovereignty may be the best and the noblest, and thy words such as are suitable and most profitable to
רס״א
261[257] thyself and to them that shall hear thee.”
רס״ב
262We have now explained the punishments inflicted on those who transgress the five oracles. But the guerdons awaiting those who keep them,
רס״ג
263[258] even if not stated by the law in actual words of the injunctions, yet may be seen to underlie them. The refusal to acknowledge other gods, or to deify the works of men’s hands, or to commit perjury, needs no other reward. For surely the practice of such abstinence is in itself the best and most perfect reward. For where can any lover of truth find greater pleasure than by devoting himself to the one God
רס״ד
264[259] and embracing his service in guilelessness and purity? I call to witness not such as serve vanity but those who are inspired with a zeal which never goes astray, those among whom truth is honoured. For wisdom is itself the guerdon of wisdom, and justice and each of the other virtues is its own reward. And much more is she, who as in a choir is the fairest and the queen of the dance—religion —her own prize and guerdon, providing happiness to those who cherish her and to their children and children’s
רס״ה
265[260] children blessings of welfare which can never be taken from them.
רס״ו
266Again, the experience of those who keep the seventh day is that both body and soul are benefited in two most essential ways. The body is benefited by the recurrence of respite from continuous and wearisome toil, the soul by the excellent conceptions which it receives of God as the world-maker and guardian of what He has begotten. For He brought all things to their completion on the seventh day. These things shew clearly that he who gives due value to the seventh day gains value for himself.
רס״ז
267[261] So too indeed he who shews respect to his parents should not seek anything further, for if he look he will find his guerdon in the action itself. However, since this commandment, inasmuch as it is concerned with mortal things, is inferior to the first four heads whose province is nearer the divine, He gave encouragement with the words, “Honour thy father and thy mother, that it may be well with thee and that thy time may be long.”
רס״ח
268[262] Here He names two rewards: one is the possession of virtue, for “well” is virtue or cannot exist without virtue, the other in very truth is salvation from death given by prolonged vitality and agelong life which thou wilt keep thriving even while in the body, if thou live with a soul purged clean of all impurity.
רס״ט
269This part of the subject has now been sufficiently discussed. We will proceed in due season to examine the contents of the second table.