על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ב י״טOn the Special Laws, Book II 19
א׳
1[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.
ב׳
2[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.
ג׳
3[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.
ד׳
4[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!
ה׳
5[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.
ו׳
6[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.
ז׳
7[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.
ח׳
8[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.
ט׳
9[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.
י׳
10Indeed, 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.
י״א
11[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.