על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ג ל״וOn the Special Laws, Book III 36
א׳
1[198] A further command is that if anyone strikes out a servant’s tooth he must grant him his liberty. Why is this? Because life is precious and the means contrived by nature for the preservation of life are teeth by which the food is subjected to the processes necessary for dealing with it. Now the teeth are divided into the cutters and the grinders; the former do their part by cutting or biting the bread-stuffs and all other comestibles, whence their appropriate name of cutters, the latter by their capacity for reducing the bitten pieces into smaller particles.
ב׳
2[199] This is the reason why the Maker and Father, Whose way is to frame nothing that does not serve some purpose, did not make the teeth straight away at birth like each of the other parts. He bore in mind that they would be a superfluous burden to the infant who would be fed on milk, and would also bring serious trouble to the breasts, the fountain through which the liquid sustenance flows, as they would be galled during the suction of the milk.
ג׳
3[200] He looked forward, therefore, to the proper time, that is, to when the infant is weaned from the breast, and brought out that supplementary growth of teeth, which He hitherto kept in storage, only when the infant would refuse to take food in the form of milk and could bear the more mature kind which requires the instruments which I have mentioned.
ד׳
4[201] If, then, anyone gives way to insolent presumption and strikes out his servant’s tooth which ministers obediently to his most essential needs, sustenance and survival, he must set at liberty the victim of his injustice and suffer himself the loss of the services and ministries of the injured party.
ה׳
5[202] Is a tooth then, I shall be asked, of the same value as an eye? They are both, I should reply, of the same value for the purposes for which they were made, the eye being made for what is visible, the tooth for what is edible. And if anyone cares to compare these, he will find that the eye is the noblest of the body’s members because it contemplates the heaven which is the noblest part of the universe, while the tooth is useful as the operator of what is most useful for maintaining life, namely food. Also anyone who has lost his sight is not thereby prevented from living, but one who has had his teeth struck out has only a most miserable death awaiting him.
ו׳
6[203] So if anyone takes steps to injure his servants in this part of their bodies he must recognize that the effect of his act upon them is a famine artificially created in the midst of abundance and plenty. For what use have they for a generous supply of food if they have been robbed of the instruments needed for dealing effectively with it, lost to them through the actions of hard, cruel and merciless masters?
ז׳
7[204] And therefore elsewhere the lawgiver forbids creditors to demand that their debtors should give their mill or upper millstone as a surety, and he adds that anyone who does so takes the life to pledge. For one who deprives another of the instruments needed to preserve existence is well on the way to murder, since his hostile intentions extend to attacking life itself.
ח׳
8[205] So careful was the lawgiver to guard against anyone helping to bring about the death of another that he considers that even those who have touched the corpse of one who has met a natural death must remain unclean until they have been purified by aspersions and ablutions. Indeed he did not permit even the fully cleansed to enter the temple within seven days and ordered them to purge themselves on the third and seventh.
ט׳
9[206] Further too, those who enter a house in which anyone has died are ordered not to touch anything until they have bathed themselves and also washed the clothes which they were wearing. And all the vessels and articles of furniture, and anything else that happens to be inside, practically everything is held by him to be unclean.
י׳
10[207] For a man’s soul is a precious thing, and when it departs to seek another home, all that will be left behind is defiled, deprived as it is of the divine image. For it is the mind of man which has the form of God, being shaped in conformity with the ideal archetype, the Word that is above all.
י״א
11[208] Everything else too, he says, that the unclean person touches must be unclean, being defiled by its participation in the uncleanness. This pronouncement may be thought to include a more far-reaching veto, not merely stopping short with the body but extending its inquiry to matters of temperament and characteristics of soul.
י״ב
12[209] For the unjust and impious man is in the truest sense unclean. No thought of respect for things human or divine ever enters his mind. He puts everything into chaos and confusion, so inordinate are his passions and so prodigious his vices, and thus every deed to which he sets his hand is reprehensible, changing in conformity with the worthlessness of the doer. For conversely all the doings of the good are laudable, gaining merit through the virtues of the agents in accordance with the general law that the results of actions assimilate themselves to the actors.