על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ב כ״הOn the Special Laws, Book II 25
א׳
1[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.
ב׳
2[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.
ג׳
3[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.
ד׳
4[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.
ה׳
5[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.
ו׳
6[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.
ז׳
7[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.
ח׳
8[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.
ט׳
9[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.
י׳
10[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.
י״א
11[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.
י״ב
12[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.
י״ג
13[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.
י״ד
14[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.
ט״ו
15[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.
ט״ז
16[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.
י״ז
17[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.
י״ח
18[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.