על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ד ל״חOn the Special Laws, Book IV 38
א׳
1[197] Another excellent injunction is that no one is to revile or abuse any other, particularly a deaf-mute who can neither perceive the wrong he suffers nor retaliate in the same way, nor on an equal footing. For no kind of fighting is so utterly unfair as that where activity is the part assigned to one side and only passivity to the other.
ב׳
2[198] This offence of reviling those who have lost the power of speech and the use of their ears is paralleled by those who cause the blind to slip or put some other obstacles in their way. For since in their ignorance they cannot surmount them, they needs must stumble about so that they both miss the right path and damage their feet.
ג׳
3[199] Those who carry out or have a zest for such tricks are menaced by the law with the terrors of God’s wrath; this is right and reasonable, since it is God alone whose arm is extended to shield those who are unable to help themselves. And his words are little less than a plain declaration to the workers of iniquity “Ye senseless fools,
ד׳
4[200] you expect to go undetected by those whom you wrong when you count their calamities a laughing matter and work your wickedness against those parts in which misfortune has befallen them, against their ears by your reviling, against their eyes by the pitfalls which you set in their way. But you will never go undetected by God who surveys and controls all things, when you trample on the misfortunes of stricken men, as if you could never fall into like disasters, though the body which you have always with you can become the prey of every disease and your senses are perishable, liable through some trifling and quite ordinary occasion, not merely to be dulled and darkened but also to suffer incurable disablement.”
ה׳
5[201] These persons have lost the knowledge of their real selves; they think that distinction raises them above the natural weakness of mankind and that they have escaped the uncertainties and caprices of fortune’s hostility, fortune who often launches her sudden blasts on those who are sailing prosperously through life and sends them foundering when almost in the very harbour of felicity. What right have they to vaunt themselves and trample on the misfortunes of others without respect for the assessor of the ruler of all, justice, whose right and duty it is with the surpassing keenness of her never-sleeping eyes to survey the secrets of the corner as though they were in bright sunlight. These men,
ו׳
6[202] it seems to me, would in their exceeding cruelty not spare the dead but would without a qualm reslay the slain, to use the popular phrase, since they shrink not to vent their outrageous fury on parts in a sense already dead, eyes which seeing not and ears which hearing not are just corpses. And therefore if he to whom these parts belong should be removed from amongst men, they will show their implacable ruthlessness and grant him none of that human and sympathetic treatment which is maintained towards the fallen even by enemies in the bitterest warfare. So much for this part of the subject.