על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ג ח׳On the Special Laws, Book III 8
א׳
1[43] Even worse than this is the conduct of some who have emulated the lusts of the Sybarites and those of others even more lascivious than they. These persons begin with making themselves experts in dainty feeding, wine-bibbing and the other pleasures of the belly and the parts below it. Then sated with these they reach such a pitch of wantonness, the natural offspring of satiety, that losing their senses they conceive a frantic passion, no longer for human beings male or female, but even for brute beasts. So according to the story did Pasiphaë the wife of King Minos long ago in Crete.
ב׳
2[44] She was enamoured of a bull, but had no hope of obtaining its company. Consequently wild with passion, for amorousness is vastly intensified by unsuccess, she reported the trouble under which she was labouring to Daedalus, who was the best craftsman of his time. His masterly skill in devising plans for capturing the uncaptured enabled him to construct a wooden cow, into which he introduced Pasiphaë through one of its sides, and the bull supposing it to be a living animal of its own kind, charged and mounted it. She became pregnant, and in the course of time bore a half-beast called the Minotaur.
ג׳
3[45] Probably, if passions are suffered to go unbridled, there will be other Pasiphaës, and not only women but also men will be frantically in love with wild beasts, which will produce unnatural monsters to serve as monuments of the disgusting excesses of mankind; whence possibly the Hippocentaurs and Chimeras and the like, forms of life hitherto unknown and with no existence outside mythology, will come into being.
ד׳
4[46] Actually so great is the provisions made in the law to ensure that men should admit no unlawful matings, that it ordains that even cattle are not to be crossed with others of a different species. No Jewish shepherd will allow a he-goat to mount a ewe or a ram a she-goat, or a bull a mare, or if he does he will be punished as an offender against the decree of nature, who is careful to preserve the primary species without adulteration.
ה׳
5[47] It is true that some people value mules above all other beasts of burden, because their bodies are compact and exceedingly muscular, and accordingly in horse-stables or other places where horses are kept they rear donkeys of huge size to which they give the name of “Celons” to copulate with the female colts, who then give birth to a hybrid animal, the mule or half-ass. But Moses, recognizing that the way in which this animal is produced contravenes nature, stringently forbade it under the wider order by which he refused permission for animals of either sex to breed with those of an unlike species.
ו׳
6[48] In making this provision he considered what was in accord with decency and conformity to nature, but beyond this he gave us as from some far-off commanding height a warning to men and women alike that they should learn from these examples to abstain from unlawful forms of intercourse.
ז׳
7[49] Whether, then, it is the man who uses a quadruped for this purpose, or the woman who allows herself to be used, the human offenders must die and the beasts also; the first because they have passed beyond the limits of licentiousness itself by evolving abnormal lusts, and because they have invented strange pleasures than which nothing could be more unpleasing, shameful even to describe; the beasts because they have ministered to such infamies, and to ensure that they do not bear or beget any monstrosity of the kind that may be expected to spring from such abominations.
ח׳
8[50] Besides, even people who care little for seemliness would not continue to use their cattle for any purpose serviceable to their life, but would regard them with abhorrence and aversion, disliking the very sight of them and thinking that even what they touch, that too must become unclean. And, when things serve no purpose in life, their survival, even if it can be turned to some account, is just a superfluity, “cumbering the earth,” as the poet puts it.