על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ב ד׳On the Special Laws, Book II 4
א׳
1under 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.
ב׳
2[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?
ג׳
3[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.
ד׳
4[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.
ה׳
5[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.
ו׳
6[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.