על שהרע נוהג לארוב לטוב י״דThat the Worse is wont to Attack the Better 14
א׳
1[45] It would have been well, then, for Abel to have exercised the saving virtue of caution, and to have stayed at home taking no notice of the challenge to the contest in wrangling. He should have imitated Rebecca, who represents patient waiting. When Esau, the votary of wickedness, threatens to murder Jacob, the devotee of virtue, she charges him against whom the plot was being hatched to go away, until Esau’s cruel madness against him be allayed.
ב׳
2[46] For it is indeed an insufferable threat that he holds over him, when he says: “Let the days of my father’s mourning draw near, that I may slay Jacob my brother” (Gen. 27:41); for he prays that Isaac, the only example of freedom from passion beneath the sun, who receives the divine warning “not to go down into Egypt” (Gen. 26:2), may become the subject of irrational passion, desiring him, I take it, to be wounded by the darts of pleasure or sorrow or some other passion. By so desiring he makes it clear that the man who falls short of perfection and knows only toilsome progress will be liable not to be wounded only but to be utterly destroyed. God, however, in His loving-kindness will neither cause a being of an inviolable kind to be the victim of a passion, nor will He hand over the pursuit of virtue to a mad murderer for ruin.
ג׳
3[47] So the words that follow “Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him” (Gen. 4:8), suggest, so far as superficial appearance goes, that Abel has been done away with, but when examined more carefully, that Cain has been done away with by himself. It must be read in this way, “Cain rose up and slew himself,” not someone else.
ד׳
4[48] And this is just what we should expect to befall him. For the soul that has extirpated from itself the principle of the love of virtue and the love of God, has died to the life of virtue. Abel, therefore, strange as it seems, has both been put to death and lives: he is destroyed or abolished out of the mind of the fool, but he is alive with the happy life in God. To this the declaration of Scripture shall be our witness, where Abel is found quite manifestly using his “voice” and “crying out” (Gen. 4:10) the wrongs which he has suffered at the hands of a wicked brother. For how could one no longer living speak?