על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ד ו׳On the Special Laws, Book IV 6
א׳
1[26] But people do damage not merely by grazing their cattle on the property of others but also by starting a fire without circumspection or foresight. For the force of fire when it has caught hold of the inflammable stuff shoots out in every direction and spreads itself abroad, and when it has once got the mastery it takes no account of any extinguishers applied to it and indeed makes full use of them as fuel to foster its growth until it has consumed them all and dies out from self-exhaustion.
ב׳
2[27] Now no one should ever leave a fire unguarded either in house or outbuilding as he knows that a single smouldering spark is often fanned into a blaze and sets fire to great cities, particularly when the flame streams along under a carrying wind.
ג׳
3[28] Thus in bitterly contested wars the chief instrument of efficiency first intermediate and final is fire, and on this combatants rely more than on their squadrons of infantry and cavalry and marines and their lavishly provided equipments of arms and engines. For a conflagration caused by a man shooting a fire-bearing arrow at the right place into a great fleet of ships has been known to consume it with the troops on board or to annihilate armies of considerable strength with the equipments on which they had rested their hopes of victory.
ד׳
4[29] Accordingly if a single person sets a heap of thorns alight and they burst into a flame which goes on to ignite a threshing floor full of wheat or barley or vetch or stacked sheaves of corn in the ear or rich soiled meadow land where herbage is growing, the person who lighted the fire must pay for the damage and thus learn by experience to guard carefully against the first beginnings of things and to refrain from stirring up and setting in action an invincible and naturally destructive force which might otherwise remain in quiescence.