על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ב מ״וOn the Special Laws, Book II 46
א׳
1[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.
ב׳
2[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.
ג׳
3[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.
ד׳
4[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?
ה׳
5[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
ו׳
6[257] thyself and to them that shall hear thee.”