על שהאל הוא ללא שינוי ב׳On the Unchangeableness of God 2
א׳
1[5] He finds a disciple and successor in Hannah, the gift of the wisdom of God, for the name Hannah interpreted is “her grace.” She received the divine seed and became pregnant. And when she had reached the consummation of her travail, and had brought forth the type of character which has its appointed place in God’s order, which she named Samuel, a name which being interpreted means “appointed to God,” she took him and rendered him in due payment to the Giver, judging that no good thing was her own peculiar property, nothing, which was not a grace and bounty from God.
ב׳
2[6] For she speaks in the first book of Kings in this wise, “I give to Thee him, a gift” (1 Sam. 1:28), that is “who is a gift,” and so “I give him who has been given.”
ג׳
3This agrees with the most sacred ordinance of Moses, “My gifts, My offerings, My fruits ye shall observe to bring to Me” (Num. 28:2).
ד׳
4[7] For to whom should we make thank-offering save to God? and wherewithal save by what He has given us? for there is nothing else whereof we can have sufficiency. God needs nothing, yet in the exceeding greatness of His beneficence to our race He bids us bring what is His own. For if we cultivate the spirit of rendering thanks and honour to Him, we shall be pure from wrongdoing and wash away the filthiness which defiles our lives in thought and word and deed.
ה׳
5[8] For it is absurd that a man should be forbidden to enter the temples save after bathing and cleansing his body, and yet should attempt to pray and sacrifice with a heart still soiled and spotted. The temples are made of stones and timber, that is of soulless matter, and soulless too is the body in itself. And can it be that while it is forbidden to this soulless body to touch the soulless stones, except it have first been subjected to lustral and purificatory consecration, a man will not shrink from approaching with his soul impure the absolute purity of God and that too when there is no thought of repentance in his heart?
ו׳
6[9] He who is resolved not only to commit no further sin, but also to wash away the past, may approach with gladness: let him who lacks this resolve keep far away, since hardly shall he be purified. For he shall never escape the eye of Him who sees into the recesses of the mind and treads its inmost shrine.