על המידות הטובות ל״זOn the Virtues 37
א׳
1[199] For instance, who would deny that the sons of the Earth-born were of high birth and progenitors of high-born children? Their lot was to be born under circumstances which distinguished them above their posterity, sprung as they were from the first bridal pair, the man and woman who then first came together in mutual intercourse to procreate their like. Nevertheless, of the sons thus born the elder did not shrink from treacherously murdering the younger, and by committing the most accursed of crimes, fratricide, was the first to pollute the earth with human blood.
ב׳
2[200] What profit was noble birth to him, who displayed in his soul an ignobleness, which God, the Overseer of human affairs, saw and abhorred and cast him forth to pay the penalty. And that penalty was this. He did not slay him at once and so make him insensible to his sufferings, but held suspended over him a multitude of deaths—deaths which made themselves felt in a constant succession of griefs and fears, carrying with them full apprehension of the miseries of his most evil plight.
ג׳
3[201] Among the worthiest men of later time was one of special holiness, whose piety the framer of the code held worthy to be recorded in the sacred books. In the great deluge when cities were submerged and annihilated, since even the highest mountains were swallowed up by the increasing magnitude and force of the mass of water which the flood produced, he alone was saved with his family, so receiving for his high excellence a reward of unsurpassed value.
ד׳
4[202] Yet of the three sons born to him, who shared in the boon bestowed on their father, one ventured to pour reproach upon the author of his preservation. He held up to scorn and laughter some lapse into which his father had fallen involuntarily, and laid bare what should have been hidden to those who knew it not, casting shame on him who begat him. He then had no profit from the glories of his birth, laid under a curse and a source of misery to his successors, a worthy fate for one who had no thought for the honour due to parents.
ה׳
5[203] Yet why should we mention these and leave out of sight the first and earth-born man, who for nobility of birth stands beyond comparison with all other mortals, moulded with consummate skill into the figure of the human body by the hand of God, the Master Sculptor, and judged worthy to receive his soul not from any other thing already created, but through the breath of God imparting of His own power such measure as mortal nature could receive? Have we not here a transcendance of noble birth, which cannot be brought into comparison with any of the other examples known to fame?
ו׳
6[204] For their renown rests on the good fortune of their ancestors, who were men, creatures which lived only to decay and perish, and their happier experiences are mostly uncertain and short-lived. But his father was no mortal but the eternal God, whose image he was in a sense in virtue of the ruling mind within the soul.
ז׳
7[205] Yet though he should have kept that image undefiled and followed as far as he could in the steps of his Parent’s virtues, when the opposites were set before him to choose or avoid, good and evil, honourable and base, true and false, he was quick to choose the false, the base and the evil and spurn the good and honourable and true, with the natural consequence that he exchanged mortality for immortality, forfeited his blessedness and happiness and found an easy passage to a life of toil and misery.