על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ג י״זOn the Special Laws, Book III 17
א׳
1[92] But those who take another’s life with swords or spears or javelins or staves or stones or anything else of the kind may not act on premeditation ; they may not have long pondered the abomination in their hearts; they may have been moved by a momentary instinct and allowed their anger to overpower their reason when they did the fatal deed. If so, theirs is but a half action, since the mind has not been under the control of the polluting influences from some far earlier time.
ב׳
2[93] But there are others, the worst of villains, accursed both in hand and will, the sorcerers and poisoners, who provide themselves with leisure and retirement to prepare the onslaughts they will make when the right time comes, and think out multiform schemes and devices to harm their neighbours.
ג׳
3[94] And therefore he orders that poisoners, male or female, should not survive for a day or even an hour, but perish as soon as they are detected, since no reason can be given for delay or for postponing their punishment. Hostile intentions if undisguised can be guarded against, but those who secretly frame and concoct their plans of attack with the aid of poisons employ artifices which cannot easily be observed.
ד׳
4[95] The only course, then, is to anticipate them by meting to the actors the treatment which others may expect to suffer through their acts. For apart from other considerations the slayer who openly uses a sword or any similar weapon will make away with a few on one particular occasion, but if he mixes an injection of deadly poison with some articles of food his victims who have no foreknowledge of the plot will be counted by thousands.
ה׳
5[96] We have certainly heard of banquets where sudden destruction has fallen upon a great assemblage of guests drawn by comradeship to eat of the same salt and sit at the same board, to whom the cup of peace has brought the bitterness of war and festivity has been changed into death. And therefore it is right that even the most reasonable and mild-tempered should seek the blood of such as these, that they should lose hardly a moment in becoming their executioners, and should hold it a religious duty to keep their punishment in their own hands and not commit it to others.
ו׳
6[97] For surely it is a horror of horrors to manufacture out of the food which is the source of life an instrument of death, and to work a destructive change in the natural means of sustenance, so that when the compulsion of nature sends them to take food and drink they do not see the pitfall that lies before them and put to their lips what will annihilate the existence which they think it will preserve.
ז׳
7[98] The same punishment must be suffered by any who, although the compounds which they make are not deadly, purvey what will set up chronic diseases. For death in many cases is preferable to diseases, particularly such as drag on through long periods of time without any favourable termination. For maladies caused by poisoning have been found difficult to cure and sometimes entirely unamenable to treatment.
ח׳
8[99] However, the bodily troubles of the sufferers from these machinations are often less grievous than those which affect their souls. Fits of delirium and insanity and intolerable frenzy swoop down upon them, and thereby the mind, the greatest gift which God has assigned to human kind, is subject to every sort of affliction, and when it despairs of salvation it takes its departure and makes its home elsewhere, leaving in the body the baser kind of soul, the irrational, which the beasts also share. For everyone who is left forsaken by reason, the better part of the soul, has been transformed into the nature of a beast, even though the outward characteristics of his body still retain their human form.