מי יורש קנייני אלוה כ״וWho is the Heir of Divine Things 26
א׳
1[128] These virtues Moses, I think, spoke of in allegory when he named the midwives of the Hebrews, Zipporah and Phuah (Ex. 1:15), for Zipporah is by interpretation “bird” and Phuah “ruddy.” It is a special property of divine wisdom that it ever soars aloft like a bird, of human wisdom that it implants modesty and discretion; and a blush, where the matter calls for blushing, is the clearest proof of the presence of these qualities.
ב׳
2[129] “Abraham took all these for Him” (Gen. 15:10) says the text. These words speak the praise of the man of worth who faithfully and honestly guards the sacred trust, which he has received of soul, sense, and speech, of divine wisdom and human knowledge, but guards it not for himself, but solely for Him who gave the trust.
ג׳
3[130] Then he continues, “he divided them in the middle,” but he does not add who this “he” is. He wishes you to think of God who cannot be shewn, as severing through the Severer of all things, that is his Word, the whole succession of things material and immaterial whose natures appear to us to be knitted together and united. That severing Word whetted to an edge of utmost sharpness never ceases to divide.
ד׳
4[131] For when it has dealt with all sensible objects down to the atoms and what we call “indivisibles,” it passes on from them to the realm of reason’s observation and proceeds to divide it into a vast and infinite number of parts. It divides the “plates of gold,” as Moses tells us, “into hairs” (Ex. 37:10), that is into length without breadth, like immaterial lines.
ה׳
5[132] So it divided each of the three in the middle, the soul into rational and irrational, speech into true and false, sense into presentations, where the object is real and apprehended, and presentations where it is not. These sections He at once placed “opposite to each other,” rational to irrational, true to false, apprehending to non-apprehending. The birds He left undivided, for incorporeal and divine forms of knowledge cannot be divided into conflicting opposites.
