מי יורש קנייני אלוה כ״גWho is the Heir of Divine Things 23
א׳
1[112] This is what I hold the words “take for me” to suggest. Here is another illustration. When God willed to send down the image of divine excellence from heaven to earth in pity for our race, that it should not lose its share in the better lot, he constructs as a symbol of the truth the holy tabernacle and its contents to be a representation and copy of wisdom.
ב׳
2[113] For the oracle tells us that the tabernacle “was set up in the midst of our uncleanness” (Lev. 16:16) that we may have wherewith to scour and wash away all that defiles our life, miserable and laden with ill fame as it is.
ג׳
3Let us consider, then, how he bade them contribute the ways and means needed for the building of the tabernacle. “The Lord spake unto Moses,” it says, saying: “Speak to the sons of Israel and take ye for me first beginnings; from all who are so minded in their heart, ye shall take my first beginnings” (Ex. 25:1, 2).
ד׳
4[114] Here then also we have an exhortation not to take for ourselves but for God, closely considering who the Giver is and doing no damage to the gifts, but preserving them undamaged and faultless, aye perfect and complete. In this dedication of the beginnings to God Moses teaches us a high truth. For indeed the beginnings of things both material and immaterial are found to be by God only.
ה׳
5[115] Look well, if you would have knowledge, at each several kind, plants, living creatures, arts, sciences. What of the first beginnings of plants? Do they consist in the dropping of the seed by the farmer, or are they the invisible works of invisible nature? What of the generation of men and the other animals? Are not the parents as it were the accessories, while nature is the original, the earliest and the real cause?
ו׳
6[116] So again with the arts and sciences. Is not nature the underlying fact, the fountain or root or foundation, or whatever name you give to the beginning which precedes all else, and is not the lore of each science a superstructure built on nature, whereas if we do not start with this as a groundwork, all that lore is imperfect? It was this, I take it, which led someone to say so aptly
ז׳
7The beginning is half the whole.
ח׳
8In these words the hidden meaning of “beginning” is nature, the underlying root as it were, the setting needed for growth in each case, to whose credit the writer assigned half the whole.
