On the Migration of Abraham<\/p>\n
Peder Borgen<\/p>\n
In On the Migration of Abraham 86\u201393 (henceforth Migration) Philo interprets the words to Abraham in Gen 12:2, \u201cI will make your name great.\u201d When setting forth his subject matter in Migration 86\u201388, Philo concludes: \u201cAnd this fair fame is won as a rule by all who cheerfully take things as they find them and interfere with no established customs, but maintain with care the constitution of their country.\u201d
\nThen, in 89\u201393, Philo addresses \u201csome\u201d who, by contrast, are in danger of interfering with established customs. Although these potential spiritualists are aware of both the literal and the symbolic aspects of the laws of Moses, they stress the symbolic meaning and neglect the literal observances.
\nPhilo applies these comments, based on Gen. 12:2, to Jewish community life, with its observances of the seventh day, its celebration of the festivals, and its practice of circumcision.<\/p>\n
Significance<\/p>\n
In his characterization of the seventh day, festivals, and circumcision, Philo draws on scriptural and traditional understandings, as well as on human experience. His formulation of the meaning of the seventh day is somewhat philosophical, but should still be characterized as a concentrated and clear formulation about real observance without digressions into hidden meanings of the numbers or language used in the biblical text. Similarities with the views of the Jewish philosopher-exegete Aristobulus (2nd century BCE) suggest that Philo utilizes received tradition. Philo\u2019s exhortation about the seventh day, therefore, fits into the traditions and customs fixed by the \u201cdivinely empowered men greater than those of our [i.e., Philo\u2019s] time\u201d (90).
\nPhilo seems to exhort himself and persons known to him. More to the point, though, Migration 86\u201393 deals with the problem that for various reasons certain observances were ignored or attacked or transformed. In noting that some among his audience have a correct intellectual understanding of the laws but are tempted toward a lifestyle unhampered by external observances, Philo exhorts them and himself to remember that the concrete and the spiritual aspects of the Law go together: we are not to separate meaning from practice, intellectual understanding from observances.
\nThe theme of community is central for understanding the Migration. According to Philo one should combine two ideals: a) to be morally noble; and b) to have the reputation of being so. This \u201cfair fame\u201d is won as a rule by compliance with the established customs of the Jewish community. Therefore it is not sufficient to have the right ideas and ignore the external observances. Those who are in danger of following such an approach are encouraged by Philo to keep both aspects together. Philo includes himself in this appeal.
\nPhilo seems here to come close to advocating a pragmatic adjustment to what is appraised by the community in order to avoid the misgivings and the censure of the many. His aim is not adequately formulated in that way, however. His main concern is to maintain the ancestral constitution (polite\u00eda) and not to jeopardize its survival in a non-Jewish surrounding.<\/p>\n
SUGGESTED READING<\/p>\n
Borgen, P. Philo of Alexandria: An Exegete for His Time. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cThe Sabbath Controversy in John 5.1\u201318 and Analogous Controversies Reflected in Philo\u2019s Writings.\u201d in Heirs of the Septuagint. Philo, Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by D. T. Runia, D. M. Hay, and D. Winston. Festschrift for Earl Hilgert (= The Studia Philonica Annual 3). Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991.
\nCohen, N. G. Philo Judaeus, His Universe of Discourse. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995.
\nHay, D. M. \u201cPutting Extremism in Context: The Case of Philo, De Migratione 89\u201393.\u201d In The Studia Philonica, vol. 9, edited by D. T. Runia and G. Sterling. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997.
\nMarcus, R., trans. Philo. Supplement I: Questions and Answers on Genesis. Supplement II: Questions and Answers on Exodus. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
\nMendelson, A. Philo\u2019s Jewish Identity. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.
\nWeiss, W. \u201cPhilo on the Sabbath.\u201d In Heirs of the Septuagint: Philo, Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by D. T. Runia, D. M. Hay, and D. Winston. Festschrift for Earl Hilgert (= The Studia Philonica Annual 3). Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991.<\/p>\n
TRANSLATION<\/p>\n
(86) What, then, is the fourth gift? That of a great name; for he says \u201cI will make your name great\u201d (Gen. 12:2; my trans. as in NJPS). The meaning of this appears to me to be as follows. As it is an advantage to be good and morally noble, so it is to be reputed as such. And, while the reality is better than the reputation, happiness comes from having both. For very many, after coming to Virtue\u2019s feet with no counterfeit or unreal homage and with their eyes open to her genuine loveliness, through paying no regard to the general opinion have become the objects of hostility, just because they were held to be bad, when they were really good. (87) It is true that there is no good in being thought to be this or that, unless you are so long before you are thought to be so. It is naturally so in the case of our bodies. Were all the world to suppose the sickly man to be healthy, or the healthy man to be sickly, the general opinion by itself will produce neither sickness nor health. (88) But he on whom God has bestowed both gifts, both to be morally noble and good and to have the reputation for being so, this man is really happy and his name is great in every deed. We should take thought for fair fame as a great matter and one of much advantage to the life which we live in the body. And this fair fame is won as a rule by all who cheerfully take things as they find them and interfere with no established customs, but maintain with care the constitution of their country. (89) There are some who, regarding laws in their literal sense in the light of symbols of matters belonging to the intellect, are over-punctilious about the latter, while treating the former with easy-going neglect. Such men I for my part should blame for handling the matter in too easy and off-hand a manner: they ought to have given careful attention to both aims, to a more full and exact investigation of what is not seen and in what is seen to be stewards without reproach. (90) As it is, as though they were living alone by themselves in a wilderness, or as though they had become disembodied souls, and knew neither city nor village nor household nor any company of human beings at all, overlooking all that the mass of men regard, they explore reality in its naked absoluteness. These men are taught by the sacred word to have thought for good repute, and to let go nothing that is part of the customs fixed by divinely empowered men greater than those of our time. (91) It is quite true that the Seventh Day is meant to teach the power of the Unoriginate and the non-action of created beings, but let us not for this reason abrogate the laws laid down for its observance, and light fires or till the ground or carry loads or institute proceedings in court or act as jurors or demand the restoration of deposits or recover loans, or do all else that we are permitted to do as well on days that are not festival seasons. (92) It is true also that the Feast [or: keeping of festivals] is a symbol of gladness of soul and of thankfulness to God, but we should not for this reason turn our back on the general gatherings of the year\u2019s seasons. It is true that receiving circumcision does indeed portray the excision of pleasure and all passions, and the putting away of the impious conceit, under which the mind supposed that it was capable of begetting by its own power: but let us not on this account repeal the law laid down for circumcising. Why, we shall be ignoring the sanctity of the Temple and a thousand other things, if we are going to pay heed to nothing except what is shown us by the inner meaning of things. (93) Nay, we should look on all these outward observances as resembling the body, and their inner meanings as resembling the soul. It follows that, exactly as we have to take thought for the body, because it is the abode of the soul, so we must pay heed to the letter of the laws. If we keep and observe these, we shall gain a clearer conception of those things of which these are the symbols; and besides that we shall not incur the censure of the many and the charges they are sure to bring against us.<\/p>\n
On the Life of Moses<\/p>\n
Maren R. Niehoff<\/p>\n
Philo\u2019s On the Life of Moses, written in the mid-1st century ce, is the only Jewish biography of Moses that has survived from Antiquity. The two volumes of Philo\u2019s treatise cover the life span of Moses as a political leader, legislator, and ideal king, giving special attention to his youth and then following his career until his death. It is Philo\u2019s declared purpose to present Moses as \u201cthe greatest and most perfect of men\u201d (Moses 1.1). Moses is for him an exemplary figure with direct moral implications for his readers.
\nPhilo\u2019s Moses strikes the modern reader as strangely familiar and highly relevant. This impression is created by two features: Philo focuses on the personal character of his hero, highlighting his individuality in the particular circumstances of his life, and uses picturesque anecdotes to show Moses in his daily life. Philo is convinced that \u201ca small matter\u201d can indicate the character of a person more authentically than big actions on the political scene (Moses 1.51). This interest in the private life of a public hero, especially his childhood, renders Philo\u2019s Moses so modern.
\nAnother central feature of Philo\u2019s biography may appear to be less modern. Philo revives the past by presenting its heroes as personal examples of virtue. He invites the readers to emulate Moses, implementing his virtues in their own lives, rather than relate to the knowledge of the past in a merely antiquarian fashion. While the modern reader is not used to finding explicit moral instruction in a political biography, Philo\u2019s style of reviving the past in highly personal terms is familiar to us from such practices as reading the Passover haggadah. Here, too, the past is revived in a very personal manner with emphasis on the theological teachings involved.<\/p>\n
Authorship and History<\/p>\n
Philo\u2019s Moses belongs to a series of writings, called the Exposition of the Laws, in which he explains the continuity of Judaism: from the creation of the world through the biographies of the biblical patriarchs to the Decalogue and the special laws of the Jews. Philo wishes to show that there is an intrinsic connection between the different aspects of Judaism: the creation of the world and the foundational laws of nature, which in turn define the image in which Mosaic Law is shaped.
\nThe Exposition was written for a wider, non-Jewish audience, as the frequent explanations of very basic facts indicate. Philo explains, for example, that the Bible opens with an account of the creation of the world (Opif. 3, Abraham 1). His Moses begins with a complaint about Greek writers, who have neglected the Israelite leader (Moses 1.1\u20133). The context of turning to a wider, non-Jewish audience can be reconstructed as that of the embassy to the Roman emperor Gaius Caligula. Philo traveled to Rome in late 38 CE as the head of the Jewish embassy in order to plead for the civic rights of the Alexandrian Jews after the pogrom in their city. Being constantly deferred by the emperor, Philo and his younger ambassadors spent at least two and a half years in Rome, most likely staying there also after Gaius\u2019s assassination in early 41 CE in order to continue the negotiations with the new emperor Claudius.
\nIn Rome Philo became familiar with the specific cultural discourse of the capital, which proved to be extremely influential on the intellectual life of the entire Empire, including the Greek-speaking East. In particular, Philo encountered here the philosophy of the Stoics, a school founded in the 4th century BCE by Zeno, and very successful in Rome after Cicero popularized their ethics in the 1st century BCE.
\nPhilo\u2019s turn to biography and his interest in the hero\u2019s daily life can be explained in the context of Stoic philosophy in Rome. The Stoics differed from other Hellenistic schools by acknowledging an impressive variety of exemplary figures as moral authorities, including thinkers from other schools and politicians. Moral authority followed from the usefulness of the model. Such role models were depicted in real life situations, which could easily be identified by the reader, rather than in an idealized state. Philo\u2019s contemporary Seneca spoke of associating with figures from the past as if they were a \u201cmost intimate friend every day\u201d (Brev. Vit. 15.14.5). The reader should \u201cfashion himself in the likeness\u201d of such great personalities (Brev. Vit. 15.2).
\nPhilo echoes this approach of Roman Stoicism when presenting heroes of the Jewish past in a highly personal fashion. The reader experiences them in their daily lives, when they confront difficult situations and make good use of opportunities that offer themselves. Much like their Stoic counterparts, Philo\u2019s biblical heroes are \u201csocially embedded.\u201d Their virtue consists in a proper mediation of social roles, political responsibilities, and moral convictions. This philosophical background prompts Philo to indulge in anecdotes as a key to understanding the moral character of his heroes.
\nPhilo\u2019s Moses belongs to the Exposition and significantly differs from the style of the Allegorical Interpretation, where the personality of Moses is never discussed. In his early writings from Alexandria, Philo instead talks about Moses as the author of the Torah, investigating his particular style of writing.
\nOn the Life of Moses is part of a series of five biographies, of which the On the Life of Abraham and the On the Life of Joseph have also survived. Philo also wrote the now lost biographies of Jacob and Isaac (Abraham 48\u201351, Josesph 1). The biography of Moses seems to have been Philo\u2019s first attempt at biography, where he carefully explains his method, sometimes even sounding a bit apologetic in face of readers, who may have different expectations (Moses 1.51). Unlike the other two extant Lives, the biography of Moses contains no allegorical passages and thus conforms more closely to the standards of Hellenistic biography.<\/p>\n
Significance<\/p>\n
The importance of Philo\u2019s biography can hardly be overestimated: he offers not only the first Jewish biography, but the first Hellenistic biography of a personal and moralizing kind, which is a famous marker of Plutarch, who was born about the time that Philo died. Philo thus throws important light not only on the richness of Hellenistic Judaism, but also provides crucial evidence for the development of the genre of biography in the Imperial Period. Moreover, his Moses is of great significance for subsequent forms of Jewish culture. Josephus and the Rabbis developed similar interests and introduced biographical sketches of biblical heroes into their writings, even though they engaged respectively in regular historiography and Bible commentary. This continuity of literary motifs shows the degree to which not only Greek-speaking Jews in the Diaspora, but also Hebrew-speaking Jews in the Land of Israel engaged in the contemporary discourse of their Greco-Roman world.<\/p>\n
GUIDE TO READING<\/p>\n
The selection below focuses on two extended passages from Philo\u2019s Moses, namely the opening chapters of the first volume treating his youth (Moses 1.1\u201344) and a passage from the beginning of the second volume describing the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek (Moses 2.12\u201351). Both passages are of special importance: the former, because it illustrates Philo\u2019s biographical style; and the latter, because it provides insights into Philo\u2019s notion of the Greek Bible, the Septuagint (LXX), as a canonical text.<\/p>\n
SUGGESTED READING<\/p>\n
Colson, F. H. Philo with an English Translation. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann, 1939.
\nFeldman, L. H. Philo\u2019s Portrayal of Moses in the Context of Ancient Judaism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
\nMomigliano, A. The Development of Greek Biography. 2nd enlarged ed. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1993.
\nNiehoff, M. R. \u201cBiographical Sketches.\u201d In Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Sch\u00e4fer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. R. Boustan, et al.
\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cBiographical Sketches of Biblical Heroes in Genesis Rabbah.\u201d In Festschrift for Peter Sch\u00e4fer. T\u00fcbingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming in 2013.
\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cPhilo\u2019s Exposition in a Roman Context.\u201d Studia Philonica Annual 23 (2011): 1\u201321.
\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cPhilo and Plutarch as Biographers: Parallel Reactions to Roman Stoicism.\u201d In Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 52 (2012): 361\u201392.
\nRoyse, J. \u201cThe Works of Philo.\u201d In The Cambridge Companion to Philo, edited by A. Kamesar, 32\u201364. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
\nWasserstein, A., and D. Wasserstein. The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n
TRANSLATION<\/p>\n
1.1\u201344<\/p>\n
1I intend to write the life of Moses, whom some describe as the legislator of the Jews, others as the interpreter of the Holy Laws. I hope to bring the story of this greatest and most perfect man to the knowledge of such as deserve not to remain in ignorance of it; 2for while the fame of the laws which he left behind has traveled throughout the civilized world and reached the ends of the earth, the man himself as he really was is known to few. Greek men of letters have refused to treat him as worthy of memory, possibly through envy, and also because in many cases the ordinances of the legislators of the different states are opposed to his. 3Most of these authors have abused their powers which education gave them, by composing in verse or prose comedies and pieces of voluptuous license, to their widespread disgrace, when they should have used their natural gifts to the full lessons taught by good men and their lives. In this way they might have ensured that nothing of excellence, old or new, should be consigned to oblivion and to the extinction of the light which it could give, and also save themselves from seeming to neglect the better themes and prefer others unworthy of attention, in which all their efforts to express bad matter in good language served to confer distinction on shameful subjects. 4But I will disregard their malice, and tell the story of Moses as I have learned it, both from the sacred books, the wonderful monuments of his wisdom which he has left behind, and from some of the elders of the nation; for I always interwove what I was told with what I read, and thus believed myself to have a closer knowledge than others of his life\u2019s history.
\n5I will begin with what is necessarily the right place to begin. Moses was by race a Chaldean, but was born in Egypt, as his ancestors had migrated there to seek food with their whole households, in consequence of the long famine under which Babylon and the neighboring populations were suffering. Egypt is a land rich in plains, with deep soil, and very productive of all that human nature needs, and particularly of corn. 6For the river of this country, in the height of summer, when other streams, whether winter torrents or spring-fed, are said to dwindle, rises and overflows, and its flood makes a lake of fields which need no rain but every year bear a plentiful crop of good produce of every kind, if not prevented by some visitation of the wrath of God to punish the prevailing impiety of its inhabitants. 7He had for his father and mother the best of his contemporaries, members of the same tribe, though with them mutual affection was a stronger tie than family connections. He was seventh in descent from the first settler, who became the founder of the whole Jewish nation.
\n8He was brought up as a prince, a promotion due to the following cause. As the nation the newcomers was constantly growing more numerous, the king of the country, fearing that the settlers, thus increasing, might show their superiority by contesting the chief power with the original inhabitants, contrived a most iniquitous scheme to deprive them of their strength. He gave orders to rear the female infants, since her natural weakness makes a woman inactive in war, but to put the males to death, to prevent their number increasing throughout the cities; for a flourishing male population is an advantage to an aggressor which cannot easily be taken or destroyed. 9Now the child from his birth had an appearance of more than ordinary charm so that his parents as long as they could actually set at nought the proclamations of the despot. In fact we are told that unknown to all but few he was kept at home and fed from his mother\u2019s breast for three successive months. 10But since, as is often the case under a monarch, there were persons prying into holes and corners, ever eager to carry some new report to the king, his parents in their fear that their efforts to save one would but cause a larger number, namely themselves, to perish with him, exposed him with tears on the banks of the river and departed groaning. They pitied themselves, being forced, as they said in their self-reproach, to be the murderers of their own child, and they pitied him, too, left to perish in this unnatural way. 11Then, as was natural in so strangely cruel a situation, they began to accuse themselves of having made bad worse. \u201cWhy did we not cast him away,\u201d they said, \u201cdirectly when he was born? The child who has not survived to enjoy kind nurtures is not usually reckoned as a human being. But we meddlers actually nurtured him for three whole months, thus procuring more abundant affliction for ourselves and torture for him, only that when we were fully capable of feeling pleasure and pain he should perish conscious of the increased misery of his sufferings.\u201d
\n12While they departed ignorant of the future, overcome by grief, the sister of the infant castaway, a girl still unmarried, moved by family affection, remained at a little distance, waiting to see what would happen, all this being brought about, in my opinion, by the providence of God watching over the child. 13The king of the country had but one cherished daughter, who, we are told, had been married for a considerable time but had never conceived a child, though she naturally desired one, particularly of the male sex, to succeed to the magnificent inheritance of her father\u2019s kingdom, which threatened to go to strangers if his daughter gave him no grandson. 14Depressed and loud in lamentation she always was, but on this particular day she broke down under the weight of cares; and though her custom was to remain at home and never even cross the threshold, she set off with her maids to the river, where the child was exposed. Then, as she was preparing to make her ablutions in the purifying water, she saw him lying where the marshland growth was thickest and bade him be brought to her. 15Thereupon, surveying him from head to foot, she approved of his beauty and fine condition, and seeing him weeping took pity on him, for her heart was now moved to feel for him as a mother for her child. And recognizing that he belonged to the Hebrews, who were intimidated by the king\u2019s orders, she considered how to have him nursed, for at present it was not safe to take him to the palace. 16While she was still debating, the child\u2019s sister, who guessed her difficulty, ran up from where she stood like a \u201cscout\u201dand asked whether she would like to take for his foster-mother a Hebrew woman who had lately been with child. 17When the princess agreed, she brought her own and the baby\u2019s mother in the guise of a stranger, who readily and gladly promised to nurse him, ostensibly for wages. Thus, by God\u2019s disposing, it was provided that the child\u2019s first nursing should come from the natural source. Since he had been taken up from the water, the princess gave him a name derived from this and called him Moses, for Mou is the Egyptian word for water.
\n18As he grew and thrived without a break, and was weaned at an earlier date than they had reckoned, his mother and nurse in one brought him to her from whom she had received him, since he had ceased to need an infant\u2019s milk. He was noble and charming to look upon. 19The princess, seeing him so advanced beyond his age, conceived for him an even greater fondness than before, and took him for her son, having at an earlier time artificially enlarged the figure of her womb to make him pass as her real and not a supposititious child. God makes all that he wills easy, however difficult is the accomplishment. 20So now he received as his right the nurture and service due to a prince. Yet he did not bear himself like the mere infant that he was, nor delight in fun and laughter and sport, though those who had the charge of him did not grudge him relaxation or show him any strictness, but with a modest and serious bearing he applied himself to hearing and seeing what was sure to profit his soul. 21Teachers at once arrived from different parts, some unbidden from the neighboring countries and the provinces of Egypt, others summoned from Greece under promise of high reward. But in a short time he advanced beyond their capacities; his gifted nature forestalled their instruction, so that his seemed a case rather of recollection than of learning and indeed he himself devised and propounded problems which they could not easily solve. 22For great natures carve out much that is new in the way of knowledge; and, just as bodies, robust and agile in every part, free their trainers from care, and receive little or none of their usual attention, and in the same way well-grown and naturally healthy trees, which improve of themselves, give the husbandmen no trouble, so that \u201cthe\u201d gifted soul takes the lead in meeting the lessons given by itself rather than the teacher and is profited thereby, and as soon as it has a grasp of some of the first principles of knowledge presses forward \u201clike the horse to a meadow,\u201d as the proverb goes. 23Arithmetic, geometry, the lore of meter, rhythm and harmony, and the whole subject of music was shown by the use of instruments or in textbooks and treatises of a more special character, were imparted to him by learned Egyptians. These further instructed him in the philosophy conveyed in symbols, as displayed in the so-called holy letters and in the regard paid to animals, to which they even pay divine honors. He had the Greeks to teach him the rest of the regular school course and the inhabitants of the neighboring countries for Assyrian letters and the Chaldean science of the heavenly bodies. 24This he also acquired from Egyptians, who give special attention to astrology. And, when he had mastered the lore of both nations, both where they agree and where they differ, he eschewed all strife and contention and sought only for the truth. His mind was incapable of accepting any falsehood, as is customary among fighters for a sect, who defend the doctrines they have propounded, whatever they may be, without examining whether they can stand scrutiny, and thus put themselves on a par with hired advocates who have no thought nor care for justice.
\n25When he was now passing beyond the term of boyhood, his good sense became more active. He did not, as some, allow the lusts of adolescence to go unbridled, though the abundant resources which palaces provide supply numberless incentives to foster their flame. But he kept a tight hold on them with the reins, as it were, of temperance and self-control, and forcibly pulled them back from their forward course. 26And each of the other passions, which rage so furiously if left to themselves, he tamed and assuaged and reduced to mildness. And if they did but gently stir or flutter he provided for them heavier chastisement than any rebuke of words could give; and in general he watched the first directions and impulses of the soul as one would a restive horse, in fear lest they should run away with the reason which ought to rein them in and thus cause universal chaos. For it is these impulses which cause both good and bad\u2014good when they obey the guidance of reason, bad when they turn from their regular course into anarchy. 27Naturally, therefore, his associates and everyone else, struck with amazement at what they felt was a novel spectacle, considered earnestly what the mind which dwelt in his body like an image in its shrine could be, whether it was human or divine or a mixture of both, so utterly unlike was it to the majority, soaring above them and exalted to a grander height. 28for on his belly he bestowed no more than the necessary tributes which nature has appointed, and as for the pleasures that have their seat below, save for the lawful begetting of children, they passed altogether even out of his memory. 29And, in his desire to live to the soul alone and not to the body, he made a special practice of frugal contentment, and had an unparalleled scorn for the life of luxury. He exemplified his philosophical creed by his daily actions. His words expressed his feelings, and his actions accorded with his words, so that speech and life were in harmony and thus though their mutual agreement were found to make melody together as on a musical instrument.
\n30Now, most men, if they feel a breath of prosperity ever so small upon them, make much ado of puffing and blowing, and boast themselves as bigger than meaner men, and miscall them offscourings and nuisances and cumberers of the earth and other suchlike names, as if they themselves had the permanence of their prosperity securely sealed in their possession, though even the morrow may find them no longer where they are. 31For nothing is more unstable than Fortune, who moves human affairs up and down in the draughtboard of life, and in a single day pulls down the lofty and exalts the lowly on high, and though they see and know full well that this is always happening, they nevertheless look down on their relations and friends and set at naught the laws under which they were born and bred, and subvert the ancestral customs to which no blame can justly attach, by adopting different modes of life and, in their contentment with the present, lose all memory of the past. 32But Moses, having reached the pinnacle of human prosperity, regarded as the son of the king\u2019s daughter, and in general expectation almost the successor to his grandfather\u2019s sovereignty, and indeed regularly called the young king, was zealous for the culture of his kinsmen and ancestors. The good fortune of his adopters, he held, was a spurious one, even though the circumstances gave it greater luster; that of his natural parents, though less distinguished for the nonce, was at any rate his own and genuine. 33And so, estimating the claims of his real and his adopted parents like an impartial judge, he requited the former with gratitude and profound affection, the latter with gratitude for their kind treatment of him. And he would have continued to do so throughout had he not found the king adopting in the country a new and highly impious course of action.
\n34The Jews, as I have said before, were strangers, since famine had driven the founders of the nation, through lack of food, to migrate to Egypt from Babylon and the inland satrapies. They were, in a sense, suppliants, who had found a sanctuary in the pledged faith of the king and the pity felt for them by the inhabitants. 35For strangers, in my judgment, must be regarded as suppliants of those who receive them, and not only suppliants but settlers and friends who are anxious to obtain equal rights with the burgesses and are near to being citizens because they differ little from the original inhabitants. 36So, then, these strangers, who had left their own country and come to Egypt hoping to live there in safety as in a second fatherland, were made slaves by the ruler of the country and reduced to the condition of captives taken by the custom of war, or persons purchased from the masters in whose household they had been bred. And in thus making serfs of men who were not only free but guests, suppliants and settlers, he showed no shame or fear of the God of liberty and hospitality and of justice to guests and suppliants, Who watches over such as these. 37Then he laid commands upon them, severe beyond their capacity, and added labor to labor; and, when they failed through weakness, the iron hand was upon them; for he chose as superintendents of the works of men of the most cruel and savage temper who showed no mercy to anyone, men whose name of \u201ctask-pursuer\u201d well described the facts. 38Some of the workers wrought clay into brick, while others fetched from every quarter straw which served to bind the brick. Others were appointed to build houses and walls and cities or to cut canals. They carried the materials themselves day and night, with no shifts to relieve them, no period of rest, not even suffered just to sleep for a bit and then resume their work. In fact, they were compelled to do all the work, both of the artisan and his assistants, so that in a short time loss of heart was followed necessarily by bodily exhaustion. 39This was shown by the way in which they died one after the other, as though they were the victims of a pestilence, to be flung unburied outside the borders by their masters, who did not allow the survivors even to collect dust to throw upon the corpses or even to shed tears for their kinsfolk or friends thus pitifully done to death. And, though nature has given to the untrammeled feelings of the soul a liberty which she has denied to almost everything else, they impiously threatened to exert their despotism over these also and suppressed them with the intolerable weight of a constraint more powerful than nature. 40All this continued to dishearten and displease Moses, who was unable either to punish those who did wrong or to help those who suffered it. What he could he did. He assisted with his words, exhorting the overseers to show clemency and relax and alleviate the stringency of their orders, and the workers to bear their present condition bravely, to display a manly spirit and not let their souls share the weariness of their bodies, but to look for good to replace the evil. 41All things in the world, he told them, change to their opposites: clouds to open sky, violent winds to tranquil weather, stormy seas to calm and peaceful, and human affairs still more so, even as they are more unstable. 42With such soothing words, like a good physician, he thought to relieve the sickness of their plight, terrible as it was. But, when it abated, it did but turn and make a fresh attack and gather from the breathing-space some new misery more powerful than its predecessors. 43For some of the overseers were exceedingly harsh and ferocious, in savageness differing nothing from venomous and carnivorous animals, wild beasts in human shape who assumed in outward form the semblance of civilized beings only to beguile and catch their prey, in reality more unyielding than iron or adamant. 44One of these, the cruelest of all, was killed by Moses, because he not only made no concession but was rendered harsher than ever by his exhortations, being those who did not execute his orders with breathless promptness, persecuting them to the point of death and subjecting them to every outrage. Moses considered that his action in killing him was a righteous action. And righteous it was that one who only lived to destroy men should himself be destroyed.<\/p>\n
2.12\u201351<\/p>\n
12That Moses himself was the best of all lawgivers in all countries, better in fact than any that have ever arisen among either the Greeks or the barbarians, and that his laws are most excellent and truly come from God, since they omit nothing that is needful, is shown most clearly by the following proof. 13Anyone who takes a considered view of the institutions of other peoples will find that they have been unsettled by numberless causes\u2014wars, tyrannies or other mishaps\u2014which the revolutions of fortune have launched upon them. Often, too, luxury, growing to excess by lavish supplies of superfluities, has upset the laws; because the mass of people, being unable to bear \u201cgood things in excess,\u201d becomes surfeited and consequently violent; and violence is the enemy of law. 14But Moses is alone in this, that his laws firm, unshaken, immovable, stamped, as it were, with the seals of nature herself, remain secure from the day when they were first enacted to now, and we may hope that they will remain for all future ages as though immortal, so long as the sun and moon and the whole heaven and universe exist. 15Thus, though the nation has undergone so many changes, both to increased prosperity and the reverse, nothing\u2014not even the smallest part of the ordinances\u2014has been disturbed, because all have clearly paid honor to their venerable and godlike character. 16But that which no famine nor pestilence nor war nor king nor tyrant, no rebel assault of soul or body or passion or vice, nor any other evil whether of God\u2019s sending or man\u2019s making, could undo, must surely be precious beyond what words can describe. 17Yet, though it may be rightly thought a great matter in itself that the laws should have been guarded securely through time, we have not reached the true marvel. There is something surely still more wonderful, even this: not only Jews but almost every other people, particularly those which take more account of virtue, have so far grown in holiness as to value and honor our laws. In this they have received a special distinction. 18Here is the proof. Throughout the world of Greeks and barbarians, there is practically no state which honors the institutions of any other. Indeed, they can scarcely be said to meet the vicissitudes of times and circumstances. 19The Athenians reject the customs and institutions of the Spartans, and the Spartans those of the Athenians, nor in the world of the barbarians, do the Egyptians maintain the laws of the Scythians, nor the Scythians those of the Egyptians\u2014nor to put it generally, the Europeans those of Asiatics nor Asiatics those of Europeans. We may fairly say that mankind from east to west, every country and nation and state, show aversion to foreign institutions, and think that they will enhance the respect for their own by showing disrespect for those of other countries. 20It is not so with ours. They attract and win the attention of all, of barbarians and Greeks, of dwellers on the mainland and islands, of nations of the east and the west, of Europe and Asia, of the whole inhabited world from end to end. 21For, who has not shown his high respect for that sacred seventh day, by giving rest and relaxation from labor to himself and his neighbors, freeman and slaves alike, and beyond these to his beasts? 22For the holiday extends also to every herd and to all creatures made to minister to man, who serve like slaves their natural master. It extends also to every kind of trees and plants; for it is not permitted to cut any shoot or branch, or even a leaf, or to pluck any fruit whatsoever. All such are set at liberty on that day, and live as it were in freedom, under the general edict that proclaims that none should touch them.
\n23Again, who does not every year show awe and reverence for the fast, as it is called, which is kept more strictly and solemnly than the \u201choly month\u201d of the Greeks? For in this last the untempered wine flows freely and the board is spread sumptuously, and all manner of food and drink and lavishly provided, whereby the insatiable pleasures of the belly are enhanced, and further cause the outburst of the lists that lie below it. 24but in our fast men may not put food and drink to their lips, in order that with pure hearts, untroubled and untrammeled by any bodily passion, such as is the common outcome of repletion, they keep the holiday, propitiating the Father of All with fitting prayers, in which they are wont to ask that their old sins may be forgiven and new blessings gained and enjoyed.
\n25That the sanctity of our legislation has been a source of wonder not only to the Jews but also to all the nations, is clear both from the facts already mentioned and those which I proceed to state. 26In ancient times the laws were written in the Chaldean tongue, and remained in that form for many years, without any change of language, so long as they had not yet revealed their beauty to the rest of mankind. 27But, in the course of time, the daily unbroken regularity of practice exercised by those who observed them brought them to the knowledge of others, and their fame began to spread on every side. For things excellent, even if they are beclouded for a short time through envy, shine out again under the benign operation of nature when their time comes. Then it was that some people, thinking it a shame that the laws should be found in one half only of the human race, the barbarians, and denied altogether to the Greeks, took steps to have them translated. 28In view of the importance and public utility of the task, it was referred not to private persons or magistrates, who were very numerous, but to kings, and amongst them to the king of highest repute. 29Ptolemy, surnamed Philadelphus, was the third in succession to Alexander, the conqueror of Egypt. In all the qualities which make a good ruler, he excelled not only his contemporaries, but all who have arisen in the past; and even until today, after so many generations, his praises are sung for the many evidences and monuments of his greatness of mind which he left behind him in different cities and countries, so that, even now an act of more than ordinary munificence or buildings on an especially great scale are proverbially called Philadelphan after him. 30To put it shortly, as the house of the Ptolemies was highly distinguished, compared with other dynasties, so was Philadelphus among the Ptolemies. The creditable achievements of this one man almost outnumbered those of all the others put together, and, as the head takes the highest place in the living body, so he may be said to head the kings. 31This great man, having conceived an ardent affection for our laws, determined to have the Chaldean translated into Greek, and at once dispatched envoys to the high priest and king of Judea, both offices being held by the same person, explaining his wishes and urging him to choose by merit persons to make a full rendering of the Law into Greek. 32The high priest was naturally pleased and, thinking that God\u2019s guiding care must have led the king to busy himself in such an undertaking, sought out such Hebrews as he had of the highest reputation, who had received an education in Greek as well as in their native lore, and joyfully sent them to Ptolemy. 33When they arrived, they were offered hospitality, and having been sumptuously entertained, requited their entertainer with a feast of words full of wit and weight. For he tested the wisdom of each by propounding for discussion new instead of ordinary questions, which problems they solved with happy and well-pointed answers in the form of apophthegms, as the occasion did not allow of lengthy speaking.
\n34After standing this test, they at once began to fulfill the duties of their high errand. Reflecting how great an undertaking it was to make a full version of the laws given by the Voice of God, where they could not add or take away or transfer anything, but must keep the original form and shape, they proceeded to look for the most open and unoccupied spot in the neighborhood outside the city. For, within the walls, it was full of every kind of living creatures and consequently the prevalence of diseases and deaths, and the impure conduct of the healthy inhabitants, made them suspicious of it. 35In front of Alexandria lies the island of Pharos, stretching with its narrow strip of land toward the city, and enclosed by a sea not deep but mostly consisting of shoals, so that the loud din and booming of the surging waves grows faint through the long distance before it reaches the land. 36Judging this to be the most suitable place in the district, where they might find peace and tranquility and the soul could commune with the laws with none to disturb its privacy, they fixed their abode there; and taking the sacred books, stretched them out toward heaven with the hands that held them, asking of God that they might not fail in their purpose. And he assented to their prayers, to the end that the greater part, or even the whole, of the human race might be profited and led to a better life by continuing to observe such wise and truly admirable ordinances.
\n37Sitting here in seclusion with none present save the elements of nature, earth, water, air and heaven, the creation of which was to be the first them of the sacred revelation, for the laws begin with the story of the world\u2019s creation, they became as it were possessed, and under inspiration, wrote, not each scribe something different, but the same word for word, as though dictated to each by an invisible prompter. 38Yet who does not know that every language, and Greek especially, abounds in terms, and that the same thought can be put in many shapes by changing single words and whole phrases and suiting the expression to the occasion? This was not the case, we are told, with this law of ours, but the Greek words used corresponded literally with the Chaldean, exactly suited to the things they indicated. 39For just as in geometry and logic, so it seems to me, the sense indicated does not admit of variety in the expression which remains unchanged in its original form, so these writers, as it clearly appears, arrived at a wording which corresponded with the matter, and along, or better than any other, would bring out clearly what was meant. 40The clearest proof of this is that, if Chaldeans have learned Greek, or Greeks Chaldean, and read both versions, the Chaldean and the translation, they regard them with awe and reverence as sisters, or rather one and the same, both in matter and words, and speak of the authors not as translators but as prophets and priests of the mysteries, whose sincerity and singleness of thought has enabled them to go hand in hand with the purest of spirits, the spirit of Moses. 41Therefore even to the present day there is held every year a feast and general assembly in the island of Pharos, whither not only Jews but multitudes of others cross the water, both to do honor to the place in which the light of that version first shone out, and also to thank God for the good gift so old yet ever young. 42But, after the prayers and thanksgivings, some fixing tents on the seaside and others reclining on the sandy beach in the open air feast with their relations and friends, counting that shore for the time a more magnificent lodging than the fine mansions in the royal precincts. 43Thus the laws are shown to be desirable and precious in the eyes of all, ordinary citizens and rulers alike, and that too though our nation has not prospered for many a year. It is but natural that when people are not flourishing their belongings to some degree are under a cloud. 44But, if a fresh start should be made to brighter prospects, how great a change for the better might we expect to see! I believe that each nation would abandon its peculiar ways, and throwing overboard their ancestral customs, turn to honoring our laws alone. For, when the brightest of their shining is accompanied by national prosperity, it will darken the light of the others as the risen sun darkens the stars.
\n45The above is sufficient in itself as a high commendation to the lawgiver; but there is another still greater contained in the sacred books themselves, and to these we must now turn to show the great qualities of the writer. 46They consist of two parts: one the historical, the other concerned with commands and prohibitions, and of this we will speak later, after first treating fully what comes first in order. 47One division of the historical side deals with the creation of the world, the other with particular persons, and this last partly with the punishment of the impious, partly with the honoring of the just. We must now give the reason why he began his law-book with the history and put the commands and the prohibitions in the second place. 48He did not, like any historian, make it his business to leave behind for posterity records of ancient deeds for the pleasant but unimproving entertainment which they give; but, in relating the history of early times, and going for its beginning right to the creation of the universe, he wished to show two most essential things: first, that the Father and Maker of the world was in the truest sense also its Lawgiver, secondly, that he who would observe the laws will accept gladly the duty of following nature and live in accordance with the ordering of the universe so that his deeds are attuned to harmony with his words and his words with his deeds.
\n49Now other lawgivers are divided into those who set out by ordering what should or should not be done, and laying down penalties for disobedience, and those who, thinking themselves superior, did not begin with this, but first founded and established their state as they conceived it, and then, by framing laws, attached to it a constitution which they thought most agreeable and suitable to the form in which they had founded it. 50But Moses, thinking that the former course, namely issuing orders without words of exhortation, as though to slaves instead of free men, savored of tyranny and despotism, as indeed it did, and that the second, though aptly conceived, was evidently not entirely satisfactory in the judgment of all, took a different line in both departments. 51In his commands and prohibitions he suggests and admonishes rather than commands, and the very numerous and necessary instructions which he essays to give are accompanied by forewords and after-words in order to exhort rather than to enforce. Again, he considered that to begin his writings with the foundation of the laws, and, surveying the greatness and beauty of the whole code with the accurate discernment of his mind\u2019s eye, and thinking it too good and godlike to be confined within any earthly walls, he inserted the story of the creation of the \u201cGreat City,\u201d holding that the laws were the most faithful picture of the world polity.<\/p>\n
On the Decalogue<\/p>\n
Sarah Judith Pearce<\/p>\n
Philo\u2019s work, whose full title is On the Decalogue, or On the Ten Words That Are the General Principles of the Laws, stands at the midpoint of his Exposition of the Law. It follows his accounts of the Creation and the lives of the ancestors, the \u201cunwritten laws,\u201d and marks the beginning of his treatment of the \u201cwritten laws\u201d of the Torah (1).
\nThis treatise begins with a series of questions and answers about the revelation on Sinai. First, why did God reveal the laws in the desert? Possible reasons include: 1. because we must leave behind the corruption of the cities in order to return to the law of nature; 2. the desert experience served to purify the people to receive the laws; 3. prepared them to live according to the law of nature; and 4. in exposing them to divine miracles (manna and water), proved the divine origin of the laws (2\u201317). Second, why were exactly Ten Commandments revealed directly by God? Because the number ten is supremely perfect, it is a sign of things that come from God (the perfection of ten, developed in 21\u201331, with examples from mathematics, music, and philosophy, is not included in this commentary). Third, how did God communicate directly with the people? Not with a human voice (God is not a created being), but through a miraculous voice created for the occasion (32\u201335). Fourth, why are the Ten Words addressed as though to one person (\u201cThou\u201d)? To teach that one just person is as valuable as the entire world; to call upon each person to observe the laws; and to teach kings to show the greatest care in addressing the humblest of their subjects (36\u201343). Philo concludes this preliminary section with explanations of the wonders that accompanied God\u2019s Revelation at Sinai (especially the voice that came from the fire) (44\u201349).
\nThe Torah specifies that God gave Ten Commandments or \u201cwords\u201d (Heb. aseret ha-devarim; in Rabbinic literature, aseret ha-dibrot, \u201cthe ten sayings\u201d) to Israel at Sinai\/Horeb (Deut. 4:13; 10:4; cf. Exod. 34:28). But it provides no clear statement of how these Ten Words, as given in Exod. 20 and Deut. 5, were to be divided into ten. Philo is in fact our earliest witness to a system for dividing up the commandments into ten and assigning them numbers. In this scheme, the First Commandment corresponds to the first imperative given in the account of the Revelation, \u201cYou shall have no other gods besides Me\u201d (Exod. 20:3; Deut. 5:7), while the Second Commandment is identified with the second imperative, the prohibition of graven images (Exod. 20:4\u20136; Deut. 5:8\u201310). The same division appears in Josephus (Ant. 3:91) and some Rabbinic sources (Sifre Num. 112; cf. B. Hor. 8a).
\nAnother way of dividing the first two commandments takes God\u2019s self-declaration, \u201cI am the LORD your God\u201d (Exod. 20:2; Deut. 5:6) as the First Commandment; the Second Commandment then begins with the prohibition of having other gods and continues with the prohibition of making graven images. The latter method of dividing the commandments is that adopted by Rabbinic Judaism.
\nAncient Judaism knows a variety of systems for ordering the commandments. According to the traditional Hebrew text (the Masoretic Text, MT), the command to honor parents is followed by the prohibition of murder (Exod. 20:13), adultery (Exod. 20:14), and theft (Exod. 20:15). The Greek translation (the Septuagint, LXX) preserves two other ways of ordering the same commandments: adultery, theft, murder (Exod. 20:13\u201315 LXX B); and adultery, murder, theft (Deut. 5:17\u201319 LXX B). Philo\u2019s writings are among a number of ancient sources that follow the ordering of Deuteronomy LXX B (e.g. the Nash Papyrus; L.A.B. 11:10\u201313).
\nIn the second part of this treatise, Philo explains the Ten Words (Gk. deka logoi) themselves. After introducing them as divided into two sets of five, engraved on two tablets (50\u201351), Philo discusses the first tablet as being concerned with duties toward God:<\/p>\n
1. You shall have no other gods before me. The prohibition condemns polytheism, and especially the worship of created things such as the elements or the heavenly bodies (52\u201365).
\n2. You shall not worship images. This prohibition shows the stupidity of worshiping lifeless images, of which the worst example is Egyptian animal worship (66\u201381).
\n3. You shall not take the name of God in vain. This prohibition applies to the use of God\u2019s name in oaths and to perjury (82\u201395).
\n4. You shall observe the seventh day and keep it holy. The lesson of this command-ment is to follow God in setting aside time for contemplation. Philo explains why Scripture speaks of the seventh day as sacred, pointing to several reasons for the sacredness of the number seven (96\u2013105).
\n5. Honor your parents. This commandment stands at the borderline of the two tablets, because it is concerned with the subject matter of both: duties to God and duties toward created things. Because of their function in generating new life, parents are similar to God; by dishonoring parents, we dishonor God. Since children owe everything to their parents, they should at least follow the irrational animals in caring for their parents\u2019 needs (106\u201320).
\nThe second tablet deals with our duties to human beings:
\n6. You shall not commit adultery (121\u201331).
\n7. You shall not kill (132\u201334).
\n8. You shall not steal (135\u201337).
\n9. You shall not give false testimony (138\u201341).
\n10. You shall not desire your neighbor\u2019s wife, house, field, slaves, ox, ass or any other of your neighbor\u2019s animals, nor anything else that belongs to your neighbor (142\u201353).<\/p>\n
In the third part of On the Decalogue, Philo expands on the idea that the Ten Words are the general principles of the \u201cspecial laws.\u201d Taking each of the Ten Words in turn, he presents other laws of the Torah as \u201cspecies\u201d of each of the \u201cgeneral principles\u201d that are the Ten Words (summarized in 154\u201375, but not included in this commentary).
\nPhilo concludes the treatise with a final question: why did God not attach any punishments to the Ten Words? He explains that God is good and wishes that human beings might choose what is best of their own free will (176\u201378).<\/p>\n
Significance<\/p>\n
In describing the relation of the Ten Words to the other laws of the Torah, Philo uses several metaphors: the head vis-\u00e0-vis the other parts of the body, the genus to the species, and the general principles to the particular. As such, each of the Ten Words has an all-inclusive, universal scope, which reinforces the idea that these Words are the universal law of nature. They are therefore addressed to all people and apply to us in the here and now, wherever we happen to be. For Philo, it is fundamental that the Ten Words heard by the people at Sinai came directly from God, without a mediator. This gives them a very special status within the laws of the Torah, most of which were revealed through Moses as God\u2019s interpreter. Moreover, the first five words are of first importance, because they deal with duties toward God, while the second five are concerned with duties toward human beings. Both sets of commandments, however, are vitally important in guiding us toward the fundamental goals of piety and humanity. In this treatise, as in all the books of the Exposition of the Law, Philo promotes the idea that the Law is wholly reasonable; his commentary, therefore, emphasizes the need for the greatest care for detail in order to discover the logic and rational coherence of the content and arrangement of the Ten Words, as befits the words of God.
\nOn the Decalogue is the earliest known commentary on the Decalogue (though Philo himself acknowledges the influence of other interpreters, e.g., Decalogue 15). Many of the questions Philo raises about the Ten Words have also been taken up by later Torah interpreters: why were the commandments revealed in the desert; did God reveal all ten; why are the commandments addressed as if to one person; how do the ten relate to the rest of the laws of the Torah? However, very few large-scale studies have engaged specifically with this treatise. Within Jewish tradition, medieval commentators like Saadia Gaon may have followed certain aspects of Philo\u2019s thinking about the Decalogue. The earliest Jewish scholar known to explicitly discuss Philo is Azariah de\u2019Rossi (1511?\u20131577?), who writes approvingly of Philo\u2019s conception of the Ten Commandments as \u201cmothers\u201d to all the other laws.<\/p>\n
GUIDE TO READING<\/p>\n
On the Decalogue is a commentary based on the Torah\u2019s accounts of the giving of the Law at Sinai, and in particular the Revelation of the Ten Words. Like other works in Philo\u2019s Exposition of the Law, this treatise is not a running commentary on each word of the scriptural text. Instead, Philo sets out to grapple with a series of questions prompted by the text and to explain why the Torah says what it says (whether in details or the big picture). This means that Philo assumes that his readers know the texts he is discussing. It is important to remember that Philo follows a Greek translation of the Torah, with some significant differences from the traditional Hebrew text, including the order of the Ten Words (which follow Greek Deuteronomy). In some parts of the commentary, such as Philo\u2019s explanation of the numbers ten (20\u201331) and seven (102\u2013105), he uses allegory to demonstrate the fullest meaning that can be derived from the words of Scripture by reading them with the eye of reason.<\/p>\n
SUGGESTED READING<\/p>\n
Amir, Yehoshua. \u201cThe Decalogue according to Philo.\u201d In The Ten Commandments in History and Tradition, edited by Ben-Zion Segal (English version edited by Gershon Levi). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1990. German-language translation in Amir, Die hellenistische Gestalt des Judentums bei Philon von Alexandria. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1983.
\nCalabi, Francesca. Filone di Alessandria: De Decalogo. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2005.
\nColson, Francis H. Philo in Ten Volumes (and Two Supplementary Volumes). Vol. 7. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press-William Heinemann, 1934.
\nDaniel-Nataf, Suzanne. Philo of Alexandria: Writings. Vol. 2 of Exposition of the Law, pt. 1. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1991 (in Hebrew).
\nFreund, Richard A. \u201cThe Decalogue in Early Judaism and Christianity.\u201d In The Function of Scripture in Early Jewish and Christian Tradition, edited by Craig E. Evans and James A. Sanders, 124\u201341. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.
\nKugel, James. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 633\u2013710.
\nNajman, Hindy. \u201cDecalogue.\u201d In The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, edited by John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow, 526\u201328. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2010.
\nNikiprowetzky, Valentin. De Decalogo: Introduction, Traduction et Notes. Paris: Cerf, 1965.
\nSandmel, Samuel. \u201cThe Confrontation of Greek and Jewish Ethics: Philo, De Decalogo.\u201d In Two Living Traditions: Essays on Religion and the Bible, 279\u201390. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972.
\nWeinfeld, Moshe. Deuteronomy 1\u201311. A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (The Anchor Bible). New York: Doubleday, 1991.<\/p>\n
TRANSLATION<\/p>\n
1. Having related in the preceding treatises the lives of those whom Moses judged to be men of wisdom, who are set before us in the Sacred Books as founders of our nation and in themselves unwritten laws, I shall now proceed in due course to give full descriptions of the written laws. And if some allegorical interpretation should appear to underlie them, I shall not fail to state it. For knowledge loves to learn and advance to full understanding and its way is to seek the hidden meaning rather than the obvious.
\n2. To the question why he promulgated his laws in the depths of the desert instead of in cities we may answer in the first place that most cities are full of countless evils, both acts of impiety toward God and wrongdoing between man and man.
\n3. For everything is debased, the genuine overpowered by the spurious, the true by the specious, which is intrinsically false but creates impressions whose plausibility serves but to delude.
\n4. So too in cities there arises that most insidious of foes, Pride, admired and worshiped by some who add dignity to vain ideas by means of gold crowns and purple robes and a great establishment of servants and cars, on which these so-called blissful and happy people ride aloft, drawn sometimes by mules and horses, sometimes by men, who bear the heavy burden on their shoulders, yet suffer in soul rather than in body under the weight of extravagant arrogance.
\n5. Pride is also the creator of many other evils, boastfulness, haughtiness, inequality, and these are the sources of wars, both civil and foreign, suffering no place to remain in peace whether public or private, whether on sea or on land.
\n6. Yet why dwell on offenses between man and man? Pride also brings divine things into contempt, even though they are supposed to receive the highest honors. But what honor can there be if truth be not there as well, truth honorable both in name and function, just as falsehood is naturally dishonorable?
\n7. This contempt for things divine is manifest to those of keener vision. For men have employed sculpture and painting to fashion innumerable forms which they have enclosed in shrines and temples and after building altars have assigned celestial and divine honors to idols of stone and wood and suchlike images, all of them lifeless things.
\n8. Such persons are happily compared in the sacred Scriptures to the children of a harlot; for as they in their ignorance of their one natural father ascribe their paternity to all their mother\u2019s lovers, so too throughout the cities those who do not know the true, the really existent God have deified hosts of others who are falsely so called.
\n9. Then as some honor one, some another god, diversity of opinion as to which was best waxed strong and engendered disputes in every other matter also. This was the primary consideration which made him prefer to legislate away from cities.
\n10. He also had a second object in mind. He who is about to receive the holy laws must first cleanse his soul and purge away the deep-set stains which it has contracted through contact with the motley promiscuous horde of men in cities.
\n11. And to this he cannot attain except by dwelling apart, nor that at once, but only long afterward, and not till the marks which his old transgressions have imprinted on him have gradually grown faint, melted away and disappeared.
\n12. In this way too good physicians preserve their sick folk: they think it unadvisable to give them food or drink until they have removed the causes of their maladies. While these still remain, nourishment is useless, indeed harmful, and acts as fuel to the distemper.
\n13. Naturally therefore he first led them away from the highly mischievous associations of cities into the desert, to clear the sins out of their souls, and then began to set the nourishment before their minds\u2014and what should this nourishment be but laws and words of God?
\n14. He had a third reason as follows: just as men when setting out on a long voyage do not begin to provide sails and tillers when they have embarked and left the harbor, but equip themselves with enough of the gear needed for the voyage while they are still staying on shore, so Moses did not think it good that they should just take their portions and settle in cities and then go in quest of laws to regulate their civic life, but rather should first provide themselves with the rules for that life and gain practice in all that would surely enable the communities to steer their course in safety, and then settle down to follow from the first the principles of justice lying ready for their use, in harmony and fellowship of spirit and rendering to every man his due.
\n15. Some too give a fourth reason which is not out of keeping with the truth but agrees very closely with it. As it was necessary to establish a belief in their minds that the laws were not the inventions of a man but quite clearly the oracles of God, he led the nation a great distance away from cities into the depths of a desert, barren not only of cultivated fruits but also of water fit for drinking,
\n16. in order that, if after lacking the necessaries of life and expecting to perish from hunger and thirst they suddenly found abundance of sustenance self-produced\u2014when heaven rained the food called manna and the shower of quails from the air to add relish to their food\u2014when the bitter water grew sweet and fit for drinking and springs gushed out of the steep rock\u2014they should no longer wonder whether the laws were actually the pronouncements of God, since they had been given the clearest evidence of the truth in the supplies which they had so unexpectedly received in their destitution.
\n17. For He who gave abundance of the means of life also bestowed the wherewithal of a good life; for mere life they needed food and drink which they found without making provision; for the good life they needed laws and ordinances which would bring improvement to their souls.
\n18. These are the reasons suggested to answer the question under discussion: they are but probable surmises; the true reasons are known to God alone. Having said what was fitting on this subject, I will proceed to describe the laws themselves in order, with this necessary statement by way of introduction, that some of them God judged fit to deliver in His own person alone without employing any other, and some through His prophet Moses whom He chose as of all men the best suited to be the revealer of verities.
\n19. Now we find that those which He gave in His own person and by His own mouth alone include both laws and heads summarizing the particular laws, but those in which He spoke through the prophet all belong to the former class.
\n20. I will deal with both to the best of my ability, taking those which are rather of the nature of summaries first. Here our admiration is at once aroused by their number, which is neither more nor less than is the supremely perfect, Ten. Ten contains all different kinds of numbers, even as 2, odd as 3, and even-odd as 6, and all ratios, whether of a number to its multiples or fractional, when a number is either increased or diminished by some part of itself.
\n(Note: 21\u201331 not included in this commentary.)
\n32. These points have been sufficiently discussed and may now be left. We must proceed to carry on the discussion to embrace what follows next. The ten words or oracles, in reality laws or statutes, were delivered by the Father of All when the nation, men and women alike, were assembled together. Did He do so by His own utterance in the form of a voice? Surely not: may no such thought ever enter our minds, for God is not as a man needing mouth and tongue and windpipe.
\n33. I should suppose that God wrought on this occasion a miracle of a truly holy kind by bidding an invisible sound to be created in the air more marvelous than all instruments and fitted with perfect harmonies, not soulless, nor yet composed of body and soul like a living creature, but a rational soul full of clearness and distinctness, which giving shape and tension to the air and changing it to flaming fire, sounded forth like the breath through a trumpet an articulate voice so loud that it appeared to be equally audible to the farthest as well as the nearest.
\n34. For it is the nature of men\u2019s voices if carried to a great distance to grow faint so that persons afar off have but an indistinct impression which gradually fades away with each lengthening of the extension, since the organism which produces them also is subject to decay.
\n35. But the new miraculous voice was set in action and kept in flame by the power of God which breathed upon it and spread it abroad on every side and made it more illuminating in its ending than in its beginning by creating in the souls of each and all another kind of hearing far superior to the hearing of the ears. For that is but a sluggish sense, inactive until aroused by the impact of the air, but the hearing of the mind possessed by God makes the first advance and goes out to meet the spoken words with the keenest rapidity.
\n36. So much for the divine voice. But we may properly ask why, when all these many thousands were collected in one spot, He thought good in proclaiming His ten oracles to address each not as to several persons but as to one, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, and so too with the rest.
\n37. One answer which must be given is that He wishes to teach the readers of the sacred Scriptures a most excellent lesson, namely that each single person, when he is law-abiding and obedient to God, is equal in worth to a whole nation, even the most populous, or rather to all nations, and if we may go still farther, even to the whole world.
\n38. And therefore elsewhere, when He praises a certain just man, He says, I am thy God, though He was also the God of the world. And thus we see that all the rank and file who are posted in the same line and give a like satisfaction to their commander, have an equal share of approbation and honor.
\n39. A second reason is that a speaker who harangues a multitude in general does not necessarily talk to any one person, where as if he addresses his commands or prohibitions as though to each individual separately, the practical instructions given in the course of his speech are at once held to apply to the whole body in common also. If the exhortations are received as a personal message, the hearer is more ready to obey, but if collectively with others, he is deaf to them, since he takes the multitude as a cover for disobedience.
\n40. A third reason is that He wills that no king or despot swollen with arrogance and contempt should despise an insignificant private person but should study in the school of the divine laws and abate his supercilious airs, and through the reasonableness or rather the assured truth of their arguments unlearn his self-conceit.
\n41. For if the Uncreated, the Incorruptible, the Eternal, Who needs nothing and is the maker of all, the Benefactor and King of kings and God of gods could not brook to despise even the humblest, but deigned to banquet him on holy oracles and statutes, as though he should be the sole guest, as though for him alone the feast was prepared to give good cheer to a soul instructed in the holy secrets and accepted for admission to the greatest mysteries, what right have I, the mortal, to bear myself proud-necked, puffed-up and loud-voiced, toward my fellows, who, though their fortunes be unequal, have equal rights of kinship because they can claim to be children of the one common mother of mankind, nature?
\n42. So then, though I be invested with the sovereignty of earth and sea, I will make myself affable and easy of access to the poorest, to the meanest, to the lonely who have none close at hand to help them, to orphans who have lost both parents, to wives on whom widowhood has fallen, to old men either childless from the first or bereaved by the early death of those whom they begot.
\n43. For as I am a man, I shall not deem it right to adopt the lofty grandeur of the pompous stage, but make nature my home and not overstep her limits. I will inure my mind to have the feelings of a human being, not only because the lot both of the prosperous and the unfortunate may change to the reverse we know not when, but also because it is right that even if good fortune remains securely established, a man should not forget what he is. Such was the reason, as it seems to me, why he willed to word the series of his oracles in the singular form, and delivers them as though to one alone.
\n44. It was natural that the place should be the scene of all that was wonderful, claps of thunder louder than the ears could hold, flashes of lightning of surpassing brightness, the sound of an invisible trumpet reaching to the greatest distance, the descent of a cloud which like a pillar stood with its foot planted on the earth, while the rest of its body extended to the height of the upper air, the rush of heaven-sent fire which shrouded all around in dense smoke. For when the power of God arrives, needs must be that no part of the world should remain inactive, but all move together to do Him service.
\n45. Near by stood the people. They had kept pure from intercourse with women and abstained from all pleasures save those which are necessary for the sustenance of life. They had cleansed themselves with ablutions and lustrations for three days past, and moreover had washed their clothes. So in the whitest of raiment they stood on tiptoe with ears pricked up in obedience to the warning of Moses to prepare themselves for a congregation which he knew would be held from the oracular advice he received when he was summoned up by himself.
\n46. Then from the midst of the fire that streamed from heaven there sounded forth to their utter amazement a voice, for the flame became articulate speech in the language familiar to the audience, and so clearly and distinctly were the words formed by it that they seemed to see rather than hear them.
\n47. What I say is vouched for by the law in which it is written, \u201cAll the people saw the voice,\u201d a phrase fraught with much meaning, for it is the case that the voice of men is audible, but the voice of God truly visible. Why so? Because whatever God says is not words but deeds, which are judged by the eyes rather than the ears.
\n48. Admirable too, and worthy of the Godhead, is the saying that the voice proceeded from the fire, for the oracles of God have been refined and assayed as gold is by fire.
\n49. And it conveys too, symbolically, some such meaning as this: since it is the nature of fire both to give light and to burn, those who resolve to be obedient to the divine utterances will live forever as in unclouded light with the laws themselves as stars illuminating their souls, while all who are rebellious will continue to be burnt, aye and burnt to ashes, by their inward lusts, which like a flame will ravage the whole life of those in whom they dwell.
\n50. Such are the points which required a preliminary treatment. We must now turn to the oracles themselves and examine all the different matters with which they deal. We find that He divided the ten into two sets of five which He engraved on two tables, and the first five obtained the first place, while the other was awarded the second. Both are excellent and profitable for life; both open out broad highroads leading at the end to a single goal, roads along which a soul which ever desires the best can travel without stumbling.
\n51. The superior set of five treats of the following matters: the monarchical principle by which the world is governed: idols of stone and wood and images in general made by human hands: the sin of taking the name of God in vain: the reverent observance of the sacred seventh day as befits its holiness: the duty of honoring parents, each separately and both in common. Thus one set of enactments begins with God the Father and Maker of all, and ends with parents who copy His nature by begetting particular persons. The other set of five contains all the prohibitions, namely adultery, murder, theft, false witness, covetousness or lust.
\n52. We must examine with all care each of the pronouncements, giving perfunctory treatment to none. The transcendent source of all that exists is God, as piety is the source of the virtues, and it is very necessary that these two should be first discussed.
\nA great delusion has taken hold of the larger part of mankind in regard to a fact which properly should be established beyond all question in every mind to the exclusion of, or at least above, all others.
\n53. For some have deified the four elements, earth, water, air and fire, others the sun, moon, planets and fixed stars, others again the heaven by itself, others the whole world. But the highest and the most august, the Begetter, the Ruler of the great World-city, the Commander-in-Chief of the invincible host, the Pilot who ever steers all things in safety, Him have they hidden from sight by the misleading titles assigned to the objects of worship mentioned above.
\n54. Different people give them different names: some call the earth Kor\u0113 or Demeter or Pluto, and the sea Poseidon, and invent marine deities subordinate to him and great companies of attendants, male and female. They call air Hera and fire Hephaestus, the sun Apollo, the moon Artemis, the morning-star Aphrodite and the glitterer Hermes,
\n55. and each of the other stars have names handed down by the myth-makers, who have put together fables skillfully contrived to deceive the hearers and thus won a reputation for accomplishment in name-giving.
\n56. So too in accordance with the theory by which they divided the heaven into two hemispheres, one above the earth and one below it, they called them the Dioscuri and invented a further miraculous story of their living on alternate days.
\n57. For indeed as heaven is always revolving ceaselessly and continuously round and round, each hemisphere must necessarily alternately change its position day by day and become upper or lower as it appears, though in reality there is no upper or lower in a spherical figure, and it is merely in relation to our own position that we are accustomed to speak of what is above our heads as upper and the opposite to this as lower.
\n58. Now to one who is determined to follow a genuine philosophy and make a pure and guileless piety his own, Moses gives this truly admirable and religious command that he should not suppose any of the parts of the universe to be the omnipotent God. For the world has become what it is, and its becoming is the beginning of its destruction, even though by the providence of God it be made immortal, and there was a time when it was not. But to speak of God as \u201cnot being\u201d at some former time, or having \u201cbecome\u201d at some particular time and not existing for all eternity is profanity.
\n59. But there are some whose views are affected with such folly that they not only regard the said objects as gods but each of them severally as the greatest and primal God. Incapacity for instruction or indifference to learning prevents them from knowing the truly Existent because they suppose that there is no invisible and conceptual cause outside what the senses perceive, though the clearest possible proof lies ready at their hand.
\n60. For while it is with the soul that they live and plan and carry out all the affairs of human life, they can never see the soul with the eyes of the body, though every feeling of ambition might well have been aroused in the hope of seeing that most august of all sacred objects, the natural stepping-stone to the conception of the Uncreated and Eternal, the invisible Charioteer who guides in safety the whole universe.
\n61. So just as anyone who rendered to the subordinate satraps the honors due to the Great King would have seemed to reach the height not only of unwisdom but of foolhardiness, by bestowing on servants what belonged to their master, in the same way anyone who pays the same tribute to the creatures as to their Maker may be assured that he is the most senseless and unjust of men in that he gives equal measure to those who are not equal, though he does not thereby honor the meaner many but deposes the one superior.
\n62. And there are some who in a further excess of impiety do not even give this equal payment, but bestow on those others all that can tend to honor, while to Him they refuse even the commonest of all tributes, that of remembering Him. Whom duty bids them remember, if nothing more, Him they forget, a forgetfulness deliberately practiced to their lasting misery.
\n63. Some again, seized with a loud-mouthed frenzy, publish abroad samples of their deep-seated impiety and attempt to blaspheme the Godhead, and when they whet the edge of their evil-speaking tongue they do so in the wish to grieve the pious who feel at once the inroad of a sorrow indescribable and inconsolable, which passing through the ears wastes as with fire the whole soul. For this is the battery of the unholy, and is in itself enough to curb the mouths of the devout who hold that silence is best for the time being to avoid giving provocation.
\n64. Let us then reject all such imposture and refrain from worshiping those who are by nature our brothers, even though they have been given a substance purer and more immortal than ours, for created things, in so far as they are created, are brothers, since they have all one Father, the Maker of the universe. Let us instead in mind and speech and every faculty gird ourselves up with vigor and activity to do the service of the Uncreated, the Eternal, the Cause of all, not submitting nor abasing ourselves to do the pleasure of the many who work the destruction even of those who might be saved.
\n65. Let us, then, engrave deep in our hearts this as the first and most sacred of commandments, to acknowledge and honor one God Who is above all, and let the idea that gods are many never even reach the ears of the man whose rule of life is to seek for truth in purity and guilelessness.
\n66. But while all who give worship and service to sun and moon and the whole heaven and universe or their chief parts as gods most undoubtedly err by magnifying the subjects above the ruler, their offense is less than that of the others who have given shape to sticks and stones and silver and gold and similar materials each according to their fancy and then filled the habitable world with images and wooden figures and the other works of human hands fashioned by the craftsmanship of painting and sculpture, arts which have wrought great mischief in the life of mankind.
\n67. For these idolaters cut away the most excellent support of the soul, the rightful conception of the Ever-living God. Like boats without ballast they are forever tossed and carried about hither and thither, never able to come to harbour or to rest securely in the roadstead of truth, blind to the one thing worthy of contemplation, which alone demands keen-sighted vision.
\n68. To my mind they live a more miserable life than those who have lost the sight of the body, for those have been disabled through no wish of their own but either through suffering from some grievous disease of the eyes or through the malice of their enemies, but these others have of deliberate purpose not only dimmed but without scruple cast away entirely the eye of the soul.
\n69. And therefore pity for their misfortune waits upon the former, punishment for their depravity quite justly on the latter. In their general ignorance they have failed to perceive even the most obvious truth which even \u201ca witless infant knows,\u201d that the craftsman is superior to the product of his craft both in time, since he is older than what he makes and in a sense its father, and in value, since the efficient element is held in higher esteem than the passive effect.
\n70. And while if they were consistent in their sin, they should have deified the sculptors and painters themselves and given them honors on a magnificent scale, they leave them in obscurity and bestow no favor on them, while they regard as gods the figures and pictures made by their workmanship.
\n71. The artists have often grown old in poverty and disesteem, and mishap after mishap has accompanied them to the grave, while the works of their art are glorified by the addition of purple and gold and silver and the other costly embellishments which wealth supplies, and are served not merely by ordinary freemen but by men of high birth and great bodily comeliness. For the birth of priests is made a matter for the most careful scrutiny to see whether it is unexceptionable, and the several parts which unite to form the body whether they make a perfect whole.
\n72. Horrible as all this is, we have not reached the true horror. The worst is still to come. We have known some of the image-makers offer prayers and sacrifices to their own creations though they would have done much better to worship each of their two hands, or if they were disinclined for that because they shrank from appearing egotistical, to pay their homage to the hammers and anvils and pencils and pincers and the other tools by which their materials were shaped.
\n73. Surely to persons so demented we might well say boldly, \u201cGood sirs, the best of prayers and the goal of happiness is to become like God.
\n74. Pray you therefore that you may be made like your images and thus enjoy supreme happiness with eyes that see not, ears that hear not, nostrils which neither breathe nor smell, mouths that never taste nor speak, hands that neither give nor take nor do anything at all, feet that walk not, with no activity in any parts of your bodies, but kept under watch and ward in your temple prison day and night, ever drinking in the smoke of the victims. For this is the one good which you imagine your idols to enjoy.\u201d
\n75. As a matter of fact I expect that such advice would be received with indignation as savoring of imprecations rather than of prayers and would call forth abusive repudiations and retorts, and this would be the strongest proof of the wide extent of impiety shown by men who acknowledge gods of such a nature that they would abominate resembling them.
\n76. Let no one, then, who has a soul worship a soulless thing, for it is utterly preposterous that the works of nature should turn aside to do service to what human hands have wrought.
\nBut the Egyptians are rightly charged not only on the count to which every country is liable, but also on another peculiar to themselves. For in addition to wooden and other images, they have advanced to divine honors irrational animals, bulls and rams and goats, and invented for each some fabulous legend of wonder.
\n77. And with these perhaps there might be some reason, for they are thoroughly domesticated and useful for our livelihood. The ox is a plougher and opens up furrows at seed time and again is a capable thresher when the corn has to be purged; the ram provides the best possible shelter, namely, clothing, for if our bodies were naked they would easily perish, either through heat or through intense cold, in the first case under the scorching of the sun, in the latter through the refrigeration caused by the air.
\n78. But actually the Egyptians have gone to a further excess and chosen the fiercest and most savage of wild animals, lions and crocodiles and among reptiles the venomous asp, all of which they dignify with temples, sacred precincts, sacrifices, assemblies, processions and the like. For after ransacking the two elements given by God to man for his use, earth and water, to find their fiercest occupants, they found on land no creature more savage than the lion nor in water than the crocodile and these they reverence and honor.
\n79. Many other animals too they have deified, dogs, cats, wolves and among the birds, ibises and hawks; fishes too, either with their whole bodies or particular parts. What could be more ridiculous than all this?
\n80. Indeed strangers on their first arrival in Egypt before the vanity of the land has gained a lodgement in their minds are likely to die with laughing at it, while anyone who knows the flavor of right instruction, horrified at this veneration of things so much the reverse of venerable, pities those who render it and regards them with good reason as more miserable than the creatures they honor, as men with souls transformed into the nature of those creatures, so that as they pass before him, they seem beasts in human shape.
\n81. So then He gave no place in His sacred code of laws to all such setting up of other gods, and called upon men to honor Him that truly is, not because He needed that honor should be paid to Him, for He that is all-sufficient to Himself needs nothing else, but because He wished to lead the human race, wandering in pathless wilds, to the road from which none can stray, so that following nature they might win the best of goals, knowledge of Him that truly IS, Who is the primal and most perfect good, from Whom as from a fountain is showered the water of each particular good upon the world and them that dwell therein.
\n82. We have now discussed as fully as possible the second commandment. Let us proceed to examine carefully the next in order, not to take God\u2019s name in vain. Now the reason for the position of this commandment in the list will be understood by those who have clear-sighted minds, for the name always stands second to the thing which it represents as the shadow which follows the body.
\n83. So after speaking first about the existence of the Ever-existent and the honor due to Him as such, He follows it at once in orderly sequence by giving a commandment on the proper use of His title, for the errors of men in this part of their duty are manifold and multiform.
\n84. To swear not at all is the best course and most profitable to life, well suited to a rational nature which has been taught to speak the truth so well on each occasion that its words are regarded as oaths; to swear truly is only, as people say, a \u201csecond-best voyage,\u201d for the mere fact of his swearing casts suspicion on the trustworthiness of the man.
\n85. Let him, then, lag and linger in the hope that by repeated postponement he may avoid the oath altogether. But if necessity be too strong for him, he must consider in no careless fashion all that an oath involves, for that is no small thing.
\n86. For an oath is an appeal to God as a witness on matters in dispute, and to call Him as witness to a lie is the height of profanity. Be pleased, I beg you, to take a look with the aid of your reason into the mind of the intending perjurer. You will see there a mind not at peace but full of uproar and confusion, laboring under accusation, suffering all manner of insult and reviling.
\n87. For every soul has for its birth-fellow and house-mate a monitor whose way is to admit nothing that calls for censure, whose nature is ever to hate evil and love virtue, who is its accuser and its judge in one. If he be once roused as accuser he censures, accuses and puts the soul to shame, and again as judge, he instructs, admonishes and exhorts it to change its ways. And if he has the strength to persuade it, he rejoices and makes peace. But if he cannot, he makes war to the bitter end, never leaving it alone by day or night, but plying it with stabs and deadly wounds until he breaks the thread of its miserable and ill-starred life.
\n88. How now! I would say to the perjurer, will you dare to accost any of your acquaintance and say, \u201cCome, sir, and testify for me that you have seen and heard and been in touch throughout with things which you did not see nor hear.\u201d My own belief is that you would not, for it would be the act of a hopeless lunatic.
\n89. If you are sober and to all appearance in your right mind, how could you have the face to say to your friend, \u201cFor the sake of our comradeship, work iniquity, transgress the law, join me in impiety\u201d? Clearly if he hears such words, he will turn his back upon his supposed comradeship, and reproaching himself that there should ever have been the tie of friendship between him and such a person, rush away from him as from a savage and maddened beast.
\n90. Can it be, then, that on a matter on which you would not dare to cite even a friend you do not blush to call God to witness, God the Father and Ruler of the world? Do you do so with the knowledge that He sees and hears all things or in ignorance of this?
\n91. If in ignorance, you are an atheist, and atheism is the source of all iniquities, and in addition to your atheism you cut the ground from under the oath, since in swearing by God you attribute a care for human affairs to one who in your view has no regard for them. But if you are convinced of His providence as a certainty, there is no further height of impiety which remains for you to reach when you say to God, if not with your mouth and tongue, at any rate with your conscience, \u201cWitness to a falsehood for me, share my evildoing and my knavery. The one hope I have of maintaining my good name with men is that Thou shouldest disguise the truth. Be wicked for the sake of another, the superior for the sake of the inferior, the Divine, the best of all, for a man, and a bad man to boot.\u201d
\n92. There are some who without even any gain in prospect have an evil habit of swearing incessantly and thoughtlessly about ordinary matters where there is nothing at all in dispute, filling up the gaps in their talk with oaths, forgetting that it were better to submit to have their words cut short or rather to be silenced altogether, for from much swearing springs false swearing and impiety.
\n93. Therefore one who is about to take an oath should have made a careful and most punctilious examination, first of the matter in question, whether it is of sufficient importance, whether it has actually happened, and whether he has a sound apprehension of the facts; secondly, of himself, whether his soul is pure from lawlessness, his body from pollution, his tongue from evil-speaking, for it would be sacrilege to employ the mouth by which one pronounces the holiest of names to utter any words of shame.
\n94. And let him seek for a suitable time and place. For I know full well that there are persons who, in profane and impure places where it would not be fitting to mention either a father or mother or even any good-living elder outside his family, swear at length and make whole speeches consisting of a string of oaths and thus, by their misuse of the many forms of the divine name in places where they ought not to do so, show their impiety.
\n95. Anyone who treats what I have said with contempt may rest assured, first, that he is polluted and unclean, secondly, that the heaviest punishments are waiting to fall upon him. For justice, who surveys human affairs, is inflexible and implacable toward such grave misdeeds, and when she thinks well to refrain from immediate chastisement, be sure that she does but put out her penalties to loan at high interest, only to exact them when the time comes to the common benefit of all.
\n96. The fourth commandment deals with the sacred seventh day, that it should be observed in a reverent and religious manner. While some states celebrate this day as a feast once a month, reckoning it from the commencement as shown by the moon, the Jewish nation never ceases to do so at continuous intervals with six days between each.
\n97. There is an account recorded in the story of Creation containing a cogent reason for this: we are told that the world was made in six days and that on the seventh God ceased from his works and began to contemplate what had been so well created,
\n98. and therefore He bade those who should live as citizens under this world- order follow God in this as in other matters. So He commanded that they should apply themselves to work for six days but rest on the seventh and turn to the study of wisdom, and that while they thus had leisure for the contemplation of the truths of nature they should also consider whether any offense against purity had been committed in the preceding days. And exact from themselves in the council-chamber of the soul, with the laws as their fellow-assessors and fellow-examiners, a strict account of what they had said or done in order to correct what had been neglected and to take precaution against repetition of any sin.
\n99. But while God once and for all made a final use of six days for the completion of the world and had no further need of time periods, every man being a partaker of mortal nature and needing a vast multitude of things to supply the necessaries of life ought never to the end of his life to slacken in providing what he requires, but should rest on the sacred seventh days.
\n100. Have we not here a most admirable injunction full of power to urge us to every virtue and piety most of all? \u201cAlways follow God,\u201d it says, \u201cfind in that single six-day period in which, all-sufficient for His purpose, He created the world, a pattern of the time set apart for thee for activity. Find, too, in the seventh day the pattern of thy duty to study wisdom, that day in which we are told that He surveyed what He had wrought, and so learn to meditate thyself on the lessons of nature and all that in thy own life makes for happiness.\u201d
\n101. Let us not then neglect this great archetype of the two best lives, the practical and the contemplative, but with that pattern ever before our eyes engrave in our hearts the clear image and stamp of them both, so making mortal nature, as far as may be, like the immortal by saying and doing what we ought. But in what sense the world is said to have been created by God in six days when no time period of any kind was needed by Him for his work has been explained elsewhere in our allegorical expositions.
\n102. As for the number seven, the precedence awarded to it among all that exists is explained by the students of mathematics, who have investigated it with the utmost care and consideration. It is the virgin among the numbers, the essentially motherless, the closest bound to the initial Unit, the \u201cidea\u201d of the planets, just as the unit is of the sphere of the fixed stars, for from the Unit and Seven springs the incorporeal heaven which is the pattern of the visible.
\n103. Now the substance from which the heaven has been framed is partly undivided and partly divided. To the undivided belongs the primal, highest and undeviating revolution presided over by the unit; to the divided another revolution, secondary both in value and order, under the governance of the Seven, and this by a Sixfold partition has produced the seven so-called planets, or wanderers.
\n104. Not that any of the occupants of heaven wander, for sharing as they do in a blessed and divine and happy nature, they are all intrinsically free from any such tendency. In fact they preserve their uniformity unbroken and run their round to and fro for all eternity admitting no swerving or alteration. It is because their course is contrary to that of the undivided and outermost sphere that the planets gained their name which was improperly applied to them by the more thoughtless people, who credited with their own wanderings the heavenly bodies which never leave their posts in the divine camp.
\n105. For these reasons and many others beside Seven is held in honor. But nothing so much assures its predominance as that through it is best given the revelation of the Father and Maker of all, for in it, as in a mirror, the mind has a vision of God as acting and creating the world and controlling all that is.
\n106. After dealing with the seventh day, He gives the fifth commandment on the honor due to parents.This commandment He placed on the borderline between the two sets of five; it is the last of the first set in which the most sacred injunctions are given and it adjoins the second set which contains the duties of man to man.
\n107. The reason I consider is this: we see that parents by their nature stand on the borderline between the mortal and the immortal side of existence, the mortal because of their kinship with men and other animals through the perishableness of the body; the immortal because the act of generation assimilates them to God, the generator of the All.
\n108. Now we have known some who associate themselves with one of the two sides and are seen to neglect the other. They have drunk of the unmixed wine of pious aspirations and turning their backs upon all other concerns devoted their personal life wholly to the service of God.
\n109. Others conceiving the idea that there is no good outside doing justice to men have no heart for anything but companionship with men. In their desire for fellowship they supply the good things of life in equal measure to all for their use, and deem it their duty to alleviate by anything in their power the dreaded hardships.
\n110. These may be justly called lovers of men, the former sort lovers of God. Both come but halfway in virtue; they only have it whole who win honor in both departments. But all who neither take their fit place in dealings with men by sharing the joy of others at the common good and their grief at the reverse, nor cling to piety and holiness, would seem to have been transformed into the nature of wild beasts. In such bestial savagery the first place will be taken by those who disregard parents and are therefore the foes of both sides of the law, the godward and the manward.
\n111. Let them not then fail to understand that in the two courts, the only courts which nature has, they stand convicted; in the divine court, of impiety because they do not show due respect to those who brought them forth from nonexistence to existence and in this were imitators of God; in the human court, of inhumanity.
\n112. For to whom else will they show kindness if they despise the closest of their kinsfolk who have bestowed upon them the greatest boons, some of them far exceeding any possibility of repayment? For how could the begotten beget in his turn those whose seed he is, since nature has bestowed on parents in relation to their children an estate of a special kind which cannot be subject to the law of \u201cexchange\u201d? And therefore the greatest indignation is justified if children, because they are unable to make a complete return, refuse to make even the slightest.
\n113. Properly, I should say to them, \u201cbeasts ought to become tame through association with men.\u201d Indeed I have often known lions and bears and panthers become tame, not only with those who feed them, in gratitude for receiving what they require, but also with everybody else, presumably because of the likeness to those who give them food. That is what should happen, for it is always good for the inferior to follow the superior in hope of improvement.
\n114. But as it is I shall be forced to say the opposite of this, \u201cYou men will do well to take some beasts for your models.\u201d They have been trained to know how to return benefit for benefit. Watchdogs guard and die for their masters when some danger suddenly overtakes them. Sheepdogs, they say, fight for their charges and hold their ground till they conquer or die, in order to keep the herdsman unscathed.
\n115. Is it not, then, a very scandal of scandals that in returning kindnesses a man should be worsted by a dog, the most civilized of living creatures by the most audacious of brutes? But if we cannot learn from the land animals, let us turn for a lesson in right conduct to the winged tribe that ranges the air.
\n116. Among the storks the old birds stay in the nests when they are unable to fly, while their children fly, I might almost say, over sea and land, gathering from every quarter provision for the needs of their parents;
\n117. and so while they in the inactivity justified by their age continue to enjoy all abundance of luxury, the younger birds making light of the hardships sustained in their quest for food, moved by piety and the expectation that the same treatment will be meted out to them by their offspring, repay the debt which they may not refuse\u2014a debt both incurred and discharged at the proper time\u2014namely that in which one or other of the parties is unable to maintain itself, the children in the first stage of their existence, the parents at the end of their lives. And thus without any teacher but their natural instinct they gladly give to age the nurture which fostered their youth.
\n118. With this example before them may not human beings, who take no thought for their parents, deservedly hide their faces for shame and revile themselves for their neglect of those whose welfare should necessarily have been their sole or their primary care, and that not so much as givers as repay-ers of a due? For children have nothing of their own which does not come from their parents, either bestowed from their own resources or acquired by means which originate from them.
\n119. Piety and religion are the queens among the virtues. Do they dwell within the confines of souls such as these? No, they have driven them from the realm and sent them into banishment. For parents are the servants of God for the task of begetting children, and he who dishonors the servant dishonors also the LORD.
\n120. Some bolder spirits, glorifying the name of parenthood, say that a father and a mother are in fact gods revealed to sight who copy the Uncreated in His work as the Framer of life. He, they say, is the God or Maker of the world, they of those only whom they have begotten, and how can reverence be rendered to the invisible God by those who show irreverence to the gods who are near at hand and seen by the eye?
\n121. With these wise words on honoring parents He closes the one set of five which is more concerned with the divine. In committing to writing the second set which contains the actions prohibited by our duty to fellow men, He begins with adultery, holding this to be the greatest of crimes.
\n122. For in the first place it has its source in the love of pleasure which enervates the bodies of those who entertain it, relaxes the sinews of the soul and wastes away the means of subsistence, consuming like an unquenching fire all that it touches and leaving nothing wholesome in human life.
\n123. Secondly, it persuades the adulterer not merely to do the wrong but to teach another to share the wrong by setting up a partnership in a situation where no true partnership is possible. For when frenzy has got the mastery, the appetites cannot possibly gain their end through one agent only, but there must necessarily be two acting in common, one taking the position of the teacher, the other of the pupil, whose aim is to put on a firm footing the vilest of sins, licentiousness and lewdness.
\n124. We cannot even say that it is only the body of the adulteress which is corrupted, but the real truth is that her soul rather than her body is habituated to estrangement from her husband, taught as it is to feel complete aversion and hatred for him.
\n125. And the matter would be less terrible if the hatred were shown openly, since what is conspicuous is more easily guarded against, but in actual fact it easily eludes suspicion and detection, shrouded by artful knavery and sometimes creating by deceptive wiles the opposite impression of affection.
\n126. Indeed it makes havoc of three families: of that of the husband who suffers from the breach of faith, stripped of the promise of his marriage vows and his hopes of legitimate offspring, and of two others, those of the adulterer and the woman, for the infection of the outrage and dishonor and disgrace of the deepest kind extends to the family of both.
\n127. And if their connections include a large number of persons through intermarriages and widespread associations, the wrong will travel all round and affect the whole State.
\n128. Very painful, too, is the uncertain status of the children, for if the wife is not chaste there will be doubt and dispute as to the real paternity of the offspring. Then if the fact is undetected, the fruit of the adultery usurp the position of the legitimate and form an alien and bastard brood and will ultimately succeed to the heritage of their putative father to which they have no right.
\n129. And the adulterer having in insolent triumph vented his passions and sown the seed of shame, his lust now sated, will leave the scene and go on his way mocking at the ignorance of the victim of his crime, who like a blind man knowing nothing of the covert intrigues of the past will be forced to cherish the children of his deadliest foe as his own flesh and blood.
\n130. On the other hand, if the wrong becomes known, the poor children who have done no wrong will be most unfortunate, unable to be classed with either family, either the husband\u2019s or the adulterer\u2019s.
\n131. Such being the disasters wrought by illicit intercourse, naturally the abominable and God-detested sin of adultery was placed first in the list of wrongdoing.
\n132. The second commandment is to do no murder. For nature, who created man the most civilized of animals to be gregarious and sociable, has called him to show fellowship and a spirit of partnership by endowing him with reason, the bond which leads to harmony and reciprocity of feeling. Let him, then, who slays another know full well that he is subverting the laws and statutes of nature so excellently enacted for the well-being of all.
\n133. Further, let him understand that he is guilty of sacrilege, the robbery from its sanctuary of the most sacred of God\u2019s possessions. For what votive offering is more hallowed or more worthy of reverence than a man? Gold and silver and costly stones and other substances of highest price serve as ornaments to buildings which are as lifeless as the ornaments themselves.
\n134. But man, the best of living creatures, through that higher part of his being, namely, the soul, is most nearly akin to heaven, the purest thing in all that exists, and, as most admit, also to the Father of the world, possessing in his mind a closer likeness and copy than anything else on earth of the eternal and blessed Archetype.
\n135. The third commandment in the second five forbids stealing, for he who gapes after what belongs to others is the common enemy of the State, willing to rob all, but able only to filch from some, because, while his covetousness extends indefinitely, his feebler capacity cannot keep pace with it but restricted to a small compass reaches only to a few.
\n136. So all thieves who have acquired the strength rob whole cities, careless of punishment because their high distinction seems to set them above the laws. These are oligarchically-minded persons, ambitious for despotism or domination, who perpetrate thefts on a great scale, disguising the real fact of robbery under the grand-sounding names of government and leadership.
\n137. Let a man, then, learn from his earliest years to filch nothing by stealth that belongs to another, however small it may be, because custom is stronger than nature, and little things if not checked grow and thrive till they attain to great dimensions.
\n138. Having denounced theft, he next proceeds to forbid false witness, knowing that false witnesses are guilty under many important heads, all of them of a grave kind. In the first place, they corrupt truth, the august, the treasure as sacred as anything that we possess in life, which like the sun pours light upon facts and events and allows none of them to be kept in the shade.
\n139. Secondly, apart from the falsehood, they veil the facts as it were in night and profound darkness, take part with the offenders and against those who are wronged, by affirming that they have sure knowledge and thorough apprehension of things which they have neither seen nor heard.
\n140. And indeed they commit a third transgression even more heinous than the first two. For when there is a lack of proofs, either verbal or written, disputants have resort to witnesses whose words are taken by the jurymen as standards in determining the verdicts they are about to give, since they are obliged to fall back on these alone if there is no other means of testing the truth. The result is that those against whom the testimony is given suffer injustice when they might have won their case, and the judges who listen to the testimony record unjust and lawless instead of just and lawful votes.
\n141. In fact, the knavery of the action amounts to impiety, for it is the rule that jurymen must be put on their oaths and indeed oaths of the most terrible character which are broken not so much by the victims as by the perpetrators of the deception, since the former do not err intentionally, while the latter with full knowledge set the oaths at nought. They deliberately sin themselves and persuade those who have control of the voting to share their sin and, though they know not what they do, punish persons who deserve no chastisement. It was for these reasons, I believe, that He forbade false witness.
\n142. The last commandment is against covetousness or desire which he knew to be a subversive and insidious enemy. For all the passions of the soul which stir and shake it out of its proper nature and do not let it continue in sound health are hard to deal with, but desire is hardest of all. And therefore while each of the others seems to be involuntary, an extraneous visitation, an assault from outside, desire alone originates with ourselves and is voluntary.
\n143. What is it that I mean? The presentation to the mind of something which is actually with us and considered to be good, arouses and awakes the soul when at rest and like a light flashing upon the eyes raises it to a state of great elation. This sensation of the soul is called pleasure.
\n144. And when evil, the opposite of good, forces its way in and deals a home thrust to the soul, it at once fills it all against its will with depression and dejection. This sensation is called grief, or pain.
\n145. When the evil thing is not yet lodged inside nor pressing hard upon us but is on the point of arriving and is making its preparation, it sends in its van trepidation and distress, messengers of evil presage, to sound the alarm. This sensation is called fear.
\n146. But when a person conceives an idea of something good which is not present and is eager to get it, and propels his soul to the greatest distance and strains it to the greatest possible extent in his avidity to touch the desired object, he is, as it were, stretched upon a wheel, all anxiety to grasp the object but unable to reach so far and in the same plight as persons pursuing with invincible zeal, though with inferior speed, others who retreat before them.
\n147. We also find a similar phenomenon in the senses. The eyes are often eager to obtain apprehension of some very far off object. They strain themselves and carry on bravely and indeed beyond their strength, then hit upon a void and there slip, failing to get an accurate knowledge of the object in question, and furthermore they lose strength and their power of sight is dimmed by the intensity and violence of their steady gazing.
\n148. And again when an indistinct noise is carried from a long distance the ears are roused and pressed forward at high speed and are eager to go nearer if they could, in their longing to have the sound made clear to the hearing.
\n149. The noise however, whose impact evidently continues to be dull, does not show any increase of clearness which might make it knowable, and so a still greater intensity is given to the ceaseless and indescribable longing for apprehension. For desire entails the punishment of Tantalus; as he missed everything that he wished for just when he was about to touch it, so the person who is mastered by desire, ever thirsting for what is absent remains unsatisfied, fumbling around his baffled appetite.
\n150. And just as diseases of the creeping type, if not arrested in time by the knife or cautery, course round all that unites to make the body and leave no part uninjured, so unless philosophical reasoning, like a good physician, checks the stream of desire, all life\u2019s affairs will be necessarily distorted from what nature prescribes. For there is nothing so secreted that it escapes from passion, which when once it finds itself in security and freedom spreads like a flame and works universal destruction.
\n151. It may perhaps be foolish to dilate at this length on facts so obvious, for what man or city does not know that they provide clear proof of their truth, not only every day but almost every hour? Consider the passion whether for money or a woman or glory or anything else that produces pleasure: are the evils which it causes small or casual?
\n152. Is not the cause why kinsmen become estranged and change their natural goodwill to deadly hatred, why great and populous countries are desolated by internal factions, and land and sea are filled with ever-fresh calamities wrought by battles on sea and campaigns on land?
\n153. For all the wars of Greeks and barbarians between themselves or against each other, so familiar to the tragic stage, are sprung from one source, desire, the desire for money or glory or pleasure. These it is that bring disaster to the human race.
\n(Note: 154\u201374 not included in this commentary.)
\n175. This is all that need be said regarding the second five to complete our account of the ten oracles which God gave forth Himself as well befitted His holiness. For it was in accordance with His nature that the pronouncements in which the special laws were summed up should be given by Him in his own person, but the particular laws by the mouth of the most perfect of the prophets whom He selected for his merits and having filled him with the divine spirit, chose him to be the interpreter of His sacred utterances.
\n176. Next let us pass on to give the reason why He expressed the ten words or laws in the form of simple commands or prohibitions without laying down any penalty, as is the way of legislators, against future transgressors. He was God, and it follows at once that as LORD He was good, the cause of good only and of nothing ill.
\n177. So then He judged that it was most in accordance with His being to issue His saving commandments free from any admixture of punishment, that men might choose the best, not involuntarily, but of deliberate purpose, not taking senseless fear but the good sense of reason for their counsellor. He therefore thought right not to couple punishment with His utterances, though He did not thereby grant immunity to evil-doers, but knew that justice His assessor, the surveyor of human affairs, in virtue of her inborn hatred of evil, will not rest, but take upon herself as her congenital task the punishment of sinners.
\n178. For it befits the servants and lieutenants of God, that like generals in wartime they should bring vengeance to bear upon deserters who leave the ranks of justice. But it befits the Great King that the general safety of the universe should be ascribed to Him, that He should be the guardian of peace and supply richly and abundantly the good things of peace, all of them to all persons in every place and at every time. For indeed God is the Prince of Peace while His subalterns are the leaders in war.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 1\u20134<\/p>\n
Naomi G. Cohen<\/p>\n
In contrast to Philo\u2019s allegorical treatises, where the biblical narrative is used as the building blocks of what are by and large philosophical and\/or theosophical allegorical constructions, On the Special Laws employs the biblical laws to serve as scaffolding for the recounting and explanation of central facets of Jewish tradition and practice. On the Special Laws also includes, in the manner of midrash, matters of tangential relation to the text, but of close relevance to the reader. Yet it is not a law book like the Mishnah or Maimonides\u2019s Mishneh Torah; nor is this treatise an ancient equivalent of an academic composition.
\nHere, a highly educated writer addresses a sophisticated Jewish audience. The primary audience must have been Jews who, like Philo himself, were fully acculturated to Hellenistic culture and society, and at the same time loyal to their Jewish roots, for only they would have had the requisite knowledge to understand his writings. Philo constantly stresses his loyalty to both the written law and the traditional customs. The avowed object of On the Special Laws 1\u20134 is to recount and explain central facets of Jewish Law in relation to the Decalogue. Among the facets selected for commentary here are the significance of the Jewish feasts, the Shema, and tefillin, and the symbolic explanations of Temple sacrifices and high priest vestments.<\/p>\n
Authorship and History<\/p>\n
No consensus exists regarding the chronologic order in which Philo composed his works. But it is quite possible that Philo worked on different parts of his work simultaneously and\/or made additions to works already completed. For more on Philo, see the essay \u201cThe Writings of Philo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Significance<\/p>\n
Jewish law is a sweepingly comprehensive set of rules for daily life\u2014covering not only prayer and divine service, but also food, drink, dress, sexual relations between husband and wife, and the rhythms of work and patterns of rest\u2014and does in fact constitute a way of living. First and foremost, On the Special Laws 1\u20134 presents many of the most pertinent of these \u201crules\u201d in a manner intended to enhance the meaningfulness of their practice. The Mishnah, Talmud, and Codes are devoted to just these matters, and hence much Philonic scholarship has focused on determining the links between Jewish law as expressed in Philo\u2019s writings and in the later traditional codification.
\nPhilo and Rabbinic Judaism are at one in their expectation that both the laws and the customs must be observed. However, while the Mishnah and the literature that developed in its wake concentrated on the details of how to perform these laws and customs, the vast majority of Philo\u2019s writings, including On the Special Laws, belong to the genre of homiletic midrash, whose object is to invest maximum spiritual meaning into Torah.
\nThe ancient world had no word for what we call \u201creligion,\u201d so Philo and others used the term \u201cphilosophy\u201d to refer to writings on the subject, since the term had already come to be used to indicate knowledge that leads to the good life\u2014that is, a recipe for right living, similar to the purpose of religion. The presentation of Judaism as a philosophy is found also in Philo\u2019s On the Life of Moses (2.216) and in Josephus\u2019s Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities (e.g., J.W. 2.119; Ant. 13.171. In Ag. Ap. 2.170, Josephus writes that Judaism subsumes within it the entire complement of the Virtues).
\nPhilo is probably the first and only source we have for the arrangement of the commandments under the rubrics of the Decalogue until this approach reappears in the writings of theologian and philosopher Rav Saadia Gaon (882\u2013942), who, like Philo, was conversant with Greek philosophy, albeit in its Arabic formulation. In Philo\u2019s day the Decalogue was not only recited as part of the daily Temple service (M. Tam. 5:1), but also formed an integral part of the morning and evening recitation of the Shema; it is in fact found in the tefillin from Qumran. In view of this, it is not surprising that Philo chose the Decalogue as an appropriate frame of reference for the discussion of the commandments. However, the Decalogue was later omitted from the daily recitation of the Shema as well as from the tefillin, apparently because of the predominant place it came to have in heretical discourse (B. Ber. 12a), or, in the words of the Sages: \u201cbecause of the allegations \/complaints \/criticisms of the sectarians \/heretics.\u201d
\nThis development probably explains the adoption of a very different arrangement in Rabbinic literature, where the commandments are midrashically classified as Taryag mitzvot. Taryag is an acronym for the number 613, which in B. Mak. 23b\u201324a is described as being composed of 248 positive commands and 365 negative ones, with the positive commands equalling the number of the parts of the body, and the negative commands corresponding to the number of days in the solar year. The shift from the Decalogue\u2019s inclusion in the recitation of the Shema and in the tefillin to its omission and the introduction of the Taryag classification would not necessarily have occurred all at once. But the overwhelming and unquestioned acceptance of the new midrashic classification hints that the Rabbis felt an urgent need for an alternative to the association of the commandments with the Decalogue exclusively. Over the years, Rabbinic authorities such as Maimonides have attempted to identify exactly which positive and negative commandments make up the total of 613, but no consensus has been reached, and today the word Taryag has become a virtual synonym for \u201call the commandments\u201d\u2014that is, the halakhah.
\nThe most significant benchmark of Philo\u2019s writings is his indissoluble intertwining of Jewish and Greek conceptualizations (see, e.g., Spec. Laws 1.13\u201320). What has earned him lasting fame is his presentation of Judaism as a spiritual path in terms of Hellenistic philosophic thought. The frame of reference and values are Jewish, while the thought patterns are Hellenistic.
\nDevoting himself to reading the Pentateuch (or perhaps more accurately, to reading into the Pentateuch the ideas and values that he deemed most important), he penned a manyfaceted library of hermeneutic works whose conceptual frame of reference is philosophic. His historical and allegorical writings have attracted the most attention over the generations, but it is primarily in On the Special Laws that he addresses himself to the actual performance of the commandments.<\/p>\n
GUIDE TO READING<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws follows immediately upon Philo\u2019s On the Decalogue, which commences with the epiphany at Sinai and proceeds to present and discuss each of the Ten Commandments. In On the Special Laws, Philo discusses the simple meaning of each of the Ten Commandments in more detail, following the order in which they appear in the Septuagint (LXX) rather than in the Masoretic Text (MT) (see comment below on 1.12). Under each rubric, he subsumes other biblical commandments as he deems appropriate, making no attempt to be comprehensive. Philo\u2019s expositions of the biblical text of the commandments provide the framework, but what would have made the work interesting to his readers were, of course, his elaborations.
\nAt the very beginning of On the Special Laws, Philo tells the reader that he now intends \u201cto examine the particular ordinances\u201d in some detail. However, instead of continuing directly with the study of the commandments under the discrete headings of the Decalogue, he opens Book 1 with a long disquisition justifying the commandment of circumcision (1\u201311; see also the comment on 1, I will begin).
\nBook 1 is devoted to the First and Second Commandments: \u201cYou shall have no other gods besides Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image\u201d (Exod. 20:3\u20134; cf. Deut. 5:7\u20138). Under these Philo includes matters referring to the worship of God\u2014many of which are embroidered with allegorical significance\u2014such as the proof of God\u2019s existence, regulations of worship, the description of the Temple in Jerusalem, the sacrifices, and the vestments of the high priest.
\nBook 2 discusses matters associated with the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Commandments: \u201cYou shall not swear falsely by the name of the LORD your God\u201d (Exod. 20:7; Deut. 5:11); \u201cRemember the Sabbath day and keep it holy\u201d (Exod. 20:8; Deut. 5:12); and \u201cHonor your father and your mother\u201d (Exod. 20:12; Deut. 5:16). The focus in this volume is Philo\u2019s handling of the Fourth Commandment, where he discusses not only the seventh day, but also, by association, matters that are a function of seven (such as shemitah, the sabbatical year, i.e., the seventh year in which the land is left fallow) and all the festive days of the Jewish calendar.
\nBook 3 deals with the Sixth and Seventh Commandments, including miscellaneous matters associated with them, in the order of the Decalogue found in the LXX: adultery and murder, rather than that of the MT: murder and adultery. (The excerpt presented here covers only adultery.) Philo prefaces his discussion by an impassioned lamentation over the tidal wave of political concerns that has engulfed him and made it impossible to devote himself, as formerly, to spiritual pursuits. While it is of course well known that during many of Philo\u2019s mature years the political situation was extremely volatile, at the same time there are degrees of emergency. Hence, on the face of it, the allusion here is to the monumental crisis of 38\u201341 CE that Philo so eloquently describes in Against Flaccus and On the Embassy to Gaius.
\nPerhaps Philo\u2019s lament appears only in the middle of On the Special Laws because it was then that the crisis came to a head, or because he hoped that by then it would have already passed; indeed, as Colson has noted in a footnote to Spec. Laws 2.262, an alternative translation of the final sentence in Spec. Laws 2 might be: \u201cWe will proceed to examine the contents of the second table when opportunity offers\u201d\u2014rather than \u201cin due season.\u201d Anyone who has ever been torn between concerns of the spirit and public obligations will empathize with Philo\u2019s description.
\nBook 4 includes Philo\u2019s discussion of matters associated with the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Commandments: \u201cYou shall not steal\u201d (Exod. 20:13; Deut. 5:17); \u201cYou shall not bear false witness against your neighbor\u201d (Exod. 20:13; Deut. 5:17); and \u201cYou shall not covet\u201d (Exod. 20:14; Deut. 5:18). The first excerpt presented in this volume (Spec. Laws 4.58\u201377) concerns the Ninth Commandment. Philo takes the context of false witness as the point of departure for legal justice in general, since it belongs to the domain of the law courts. Along with several digressions, 58\u201377 contain the first installment of Philo\u2019s discussion of justice. He returns to the subject in 136, from a very different vantage point.
\nToward the end of Spec. Laws 4, Philo turns from his discussion of which laws fit under which specific rubric in the Decalogue to \u201csome things, common to all, which fit not with some particular number such as one or two, but with all the Ten Great Words\u201d (4.133). He concludes the book with an encomium on \u201cequality,\u201d whose daughter is \u201cJustice\u201d\u2014mean-ing, in this context, that each receives what is fitting for him (4.230\u201338).
\nMuch of Philo\u2019s writing appears to our 21st-century eyes as rambling and long-winded verbiage, yet at least two of his works, On the Embassy to Gaius and Against Flaccus, make fascinating reading even in our day. It is our knowledge of the current events described by Philo in them and our empathy for them that make the difference. Readers should keep in mind that Philo wrote in a specific time and place, for a specific audience. Reading him with the eyes of his contemporaries often clarifies Philo\u2019s message and at times even transforms a passage, revealing its vitality and leading to insights that are more likely to be true than conclusions drawn from a surface reading.<\/p>\n
SUGGESTED READING<\/p>\n
Belkin, Samuel. Philo and the Oral Law: The Philonic Interpretation of Biblical Law in Relation to the Palestinian Halakah. Harvard Semitic Series 9. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940.
\nBorgen, Peder. Philo of Alexandria: An Exegete for His Time. Supplements to Novum Testamentum 86. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
\nCohen, Naomi G. Philo Judaeus: His Universe of Discourse. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995.
\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cThe Jewish Dimension of Philo\u2019s Judaism: An Elucidation of De Specialibus Legibus IV 132\u2013150.\u201d Journal of Jewish Studies 38 (1987): 165\u201386.
\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cThe Greek Virtues and the Mosaic Laws in Philo: An Elucidation of de Specialibus Legibus IV 133\u2013135.\u201d The Studia Philonica Annual 5 (1993): 9\u201323.
\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cThe Elucidation of Philo\u2019s Spec. Leg. 4:137\u20138: \u2018Stamped Too with Genuine Seals.\u2019 \u201d In Classical Studies in Honor of David Sohlberg, edited by Ranon Katzoff with Yaakov Petroff and David Schaps, 153\u201366. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1996.
\nRunia, David. \u201cHow to Read Philo.\u201d Norsk Teologisk Tidsskrift 40 (1986): 185\u201398.
\nSchenck, Kenneth. A Brief Guide to Philo. Louisville ky: Westminster-John Knox, 2005.
\nUrbach, Ephra\u00efm Elimelech. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, translated by Israel Abrahams. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Reprint, 2006.
\nWolfson, Harry Austryn. Philo. 2 vols. (particularly 1:217\u201326). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948.<\/p>\n
TRANSLATION<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 1<\/p>\n
On the special laws which fall under the two heads of the ten commandments, one of which is directed against the acknowledgement of other sovereign gods save the one, and the other against giving honors to the works of men\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 1.1\u201320<\/p>\n
1The Ten Words, as they are called, the main heads under which are summarized the Special Laws, have been explained in detail in the preceding treatise. We have now, as the sequence of our dissertation requires, to examine the particular ordinances. I will begin with that which is an object of ridicule among many people.<\/p>\n
ON CIRCUMCISION<\/p>\n
2Now the practice which is thus ridiculed, namely the circumcision of the genital organs, is very zealously observed by many other nations, particularly by the Egyptians, a race regarded as pre-eminent for its populousness, its antiquity and its attachment to philosophy. 3And therefore it would be well for the detractors to desist from childish mockery and to inquire in a wiser and more serious spirit into the causes to which the persistence of this custom is due, instead of dismissing the matter prematurely and impugning the good sense of great nations. Such persons might naturally reflect that all these thousands in every generation undergo the operation and suffer severe pains in mutilating the bodies of themselves and their nearest and dearest, and that there are many circumstances which urge the retention and performance of a custom introduced by the men of old. The principal reasons are four in number.
\n4One is that it secures exemption from the severe and almost incurable malady of the prepuce called anthrax or carbuncle, so named, I believe, from the slow fire which it sets up and to which those who retain the foreskin are more susceptible.
\n5Secondly, it promotes the cleanliness of the whole body as befits the consecrated order, and therefore the Egyptians carry the practice to a further extreme and have the bodies of their priests shaved. For some substances which need to be cleared away collect and secrete themselves both in the hair and the foreskin. 6Thirdly, it assimilates the circumcised member to the heart. For as both are framed to serve for generation, thought being generated by the spirit force in the heart, living creatures by the reproductive organ, the earliest men held that the unseen and superior element to which the concepts of the mind owe their existence should have assimilated to it the visible and apparent, the natural parent of the things perceived by sense. 7The fourth and most vital reason is its adaptation to give fertility of offspring, for we are told that it causes the semen to travel aright without being scattered or dropped into the folds of the foreskin, and therefore the circumcised nations appear to be the most prolific and populous.
\n8These are the explanations handed down to us from the old-time studies of divinely gifted men who made deep research into the writings of Moses. To these I would add that I consider circumcision to be a symbol of two things most necessary to our well-being.
\n9One is the excision of pleasures which bewitch the mind. For since among the love-lures of pleasure, the palm is held by the mating of man and woman, the legislators thought good to dock the organ which ministers to such intercourse, thus making circumcision the figure of the excision of excessive and superfluous pleasure, not only of one pleasure but of all the other pleasures signified by one, and that, the most imperious.
\n10The other reason is that a man should know himself and banish from the soul the grievous malady of conceit. For there are some who have prided themselves on their power of fashioning as with a sculptor\u2019s cunning the fairest of creatures, man, and in their braggart pride assumed godship, closing their eyes to the Cause of all that comes into being, though they might find in their familiars a corrective for their delusion. 11For in their midst are many men incapable of begetting and many women barren, whose matings are ineffective and who grow old childless. The evil belief, therefore, needs to be excised from the mind with any others that are not loyal to God.<\/p>\n
THE FIRST AND SECOND COMMANDMENTS<\/p>\n
12So much for these matters. We must now turn to the particular laws, taking those first with which it is well to begin, namely those the subject of which is the sole sovereignty of God.
\n13Some have supposed that the sun and moon and the other stars were gods with absolute powers and ascribed to them the causation of all events. But Moses held that the universe was created and is in a sense the greatest of commonwealths, having magistrates and subjects; for magistrates, all the heavenly bodies, fixed or wandering; for subjects, such beings as exist below the moon, in the air or on the earth. 14The said magistrates, however, in his view have not unconditional powers, but are lieutenants of the one Father of All, and it is by copying the example of His government exercised according to law and justice over all created beings that they acquit themselves aright; but those who do not descry the Charioteer mounted above attribute the causation of all the events in the universe to the team that draw the chariot as though they were sole agents. 15From this ignorance our most holy lawgiver would convert them to knowledge with these words: \u201cDo not when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars and all the ordered host of heaven go astray and worship them.\u201d Well indeed and aptly does he call the acceptance of the heavenly bodies as gods a going astray or wandering. 16For those who see the sun with its advances and retreats producing the yearly seasons in which the animals and plants and fruits are brought at fixed periods of time from their birth to maturity, and the moon as handmaid and successor to the sun taking over at night the care and supervision of all that he had charge of by day, and the other stars in accordance with their sympathetic affinity to things on earth acting and working in a thousand ways for the preservation of the All, have wandered infinitely far in supposing that they alone are gods. 17But if they had been at pains to walk in that road where there is no straying, they would at once have perceived that just as sense is the servitor of mind, so too all the beings perceived by sense are the ministers of Him who is perceived by the mind. It is enough for them if they gain the second place. 18For it is quite ridiculous to deny that if the mind in us, so exceedingly small and invisible, is yet the ruler of the organs of sense, the mind of the universe, so transcendently great and perfect, must be the King of kings who are seen by Him though He is not seen by them. 19So all the gods which sense descries in heaven must not be supposed to possess absolute power but to have received the rank of subordinate rulers, naturally liable to correction, though in virtue of their excellence never destined to undergo it. 20Therefore carrying our thoughts beyond all the realm of visible existence let us proceed to give honor to the Immaterial, the Invisible, the Apprehended by the understanding alone, who is not only God of gods, whether perceived by sense or by mind, but also the Maker of all. And if anyone renders the worship due to the Eternal, the Creator, to a created being and one later in time, he must stand recorded as infatuated and guilty of impiety in the highest degree.<\/p>\n
1.32\u201357<\/p>\n
GOD\u2019S EXISTENCE AND HIS ESSENCE<\/p>\n
32Doubtless hard to unriddle and hard to apprehend is the Father and Ruler of all, but that is no reason why we should shrink from searching for Him. But in such searching two principal questions arise which demand the consideration of the genuine philosopher. One is whether the Deity exists, a question necessitated by those who practice atheism, the worst form of wickedness. The other is what the Deity is in essence. Now to answer the first question does not need much labor, but the second is not only difficult but perhaps impossible to solve. Still, both must be examined. 33We see then that any piece of work always involves the knowledge of a workman. Who can look upon statutes or painting without thinking at once of a sculptor or painter? Who can see clothes or ships or houses without getting the idea of a weaver and a shipwright and a house-builder? And when one enters a well- ordered city in which the arrangements for civil life are very admirably managed, what else will he suppose but that this city is directed by good rulers? 34So then he who comes to the truly Great City, this world, and beholds hills and plains teeming with animals and plants, the rivers, spring-fed or winter torrents, streaming along, the seas with their expanses, the air with its happily tempered phases, the yearly seasons passing into each other, and then the sun and moon ruling the day and night, and the other heavenly bodies fixed or planetary and the whole firmament revolving in rhythmic order, must he not naturally or rather necessarily gain the conception of the Maker and Father and Ruler also? 35For none of the works of human art is self-made, and the highest art and knowledge is shown in this universe, so that surely it has been wrought by one of excellent knowledge and absolute perfection. In this way we have gained the conception of the existence of God.
\n36As for the divine essence, though in fact it is hard to track and hard to apprehend, it still calls for all the inquiry possible. For nothing is better than to search for the true God, even if the discovery of Him eludes human capacity, since the very wish to learn, if earnestly entertained, produces untold joys and pleasures. 37We have the testimony of those who have not taken a mere sip of philosophy but have feasted more abundantly on its reasonings and conclusions. For with them the reason soars away from earth into the heights, travels through the upper air and accompanies the revolutions of the sun and moon and the whole heaven and in its desire to see all that is there, finds its powers of sight blurred, for so pure and vast is the radiance that pours therefrom that the soul\u2019s eye is dizzied by the flashing of the rays. 38Yet it does not therefore faintheartedly give up the task, but with purpose unsubdued, presses onward to such contemplation as is possible, like the athlete who strives for the second prize since he has been disappointed of the first. Now second to the true vision stands conjecture and theorizing and all that can be brought into the category of reasonable probability. 39So then just as, though we do not know and cannot with certainty determine what each of the stars is in the purity of its essence, we eagerly persist in the search because our natural love of learning makes us delight in what seems probable, 40so too, though the clear vision of God as He really is is denied us, we ought not to relinquish the quest. For the very seeking, even without finding, is felicity in itself, just as no one blames the eyes of the body because, when unable to see the sun itself, they see the emanation of its rays as it reaches the earth, which is but the extremity of the brightness which the beams of the sun give forth.<\/p>\n
CONJECTURE AND THEORIZING<\/p>\n
41It was this which Moses the sacred guide, most dearly beloved of God, had before his eyes when he besought God with the words, \u201cReveal Thyself to me.\u201d In these words we may almost hear plainly the inspired cry \u201cThis universe has been my teacher, to bring me to the knowledge that Thou art and dost subsist. As Thy son, it has told me of its Father, as Thy work of its contriver. But what Thou art in Thy essence I desire to understand, yet find in no part of the All any to guide me to this knowledge. 42Therefore I pray and beseech Thee to accept the supplication of a suppliant, a lover of God, one whose mind is set to serve Thee alone; for as knowledge of the light does not come by any other source but what itself supplies, so too Thou alone canst tell me of Thyself. Wherefore I crave pardon if, for lack of a teacher, I venture to appeal to Thee in my desire to learn of Thee.\u201d 43He replies, \u201cThy zeal I approve as praiseworthy, but the request cannot fitly be granted to any that are brought into being by creation. I freely bestow what is in accordance with the recipient; for not all that I can give with ease is within man\u2019s power to take, and therefore to him that is worthy of My grace I extend all the boons which he is capable of receiving. 44But the apprehension of Me is something more than human nature, yea even the whole heaven and universe will be able to contain. Know thyself, then, and do not be led away by impulses and desires beyond thy capacity, nor let yearning for the unattainable uplift and carry thee off thy feet, for of the obtainable nothing shall be denied thee.\u201d
\n45When Moses heard this, he addressed to Him a second petition and said, \u201cI bow before Thy admonitions, that I never could have received the vision of Thee clearly manifested, but I beseech Thee that I may at least see the glory that surrounds Thee, and by Thy glory I understand the Powers that keep guard around Thee, of whom I would fain gain apprehension, for though hitherto that has escaped me, the thought of it creates in me a mighty longing to have knowledge of them.\u201d46To this He answers, \u201cThe Powers which thou seekest to know are discerned not by sight, but by mind even as I, Whose they are, am discerned by mind and not by sight, and when I say \u2018they are discerned by mind\u2019 I speak not of those which are now actually apprehended by mind but mean that if these other powers could be apprehended it would not be by sense but by mind at its purest. 47But while in their essence they are beyond your apprehension, they nevertheless present to your sight a sort of impress and copy of their active working. You men have for your use seals which when brought into contact with wax or similar material stamp on them any number of impressions while they themselves are not docked in any part thereby but remain as they were. Such you must conceive My powers to be, supplying quality and shape to things which lack either and yet changing or lessening nothing of their eternal nature. 48Some among you call them not inaptly \u2018forms\u2019 or \u2018ideas,\u2019 since they bring form into everything that is, giving order to the disordered, limit to the unlimited, bounds to the unbounded, shape to the shapeless, and in general changing the worse to something better. 49Do not, then, hope to be ever able to apprehend Me or any of My powers in Our essence. But I readily and with right goodwill will admit you to a share of what is attainable. That means that I bid you come and contemplate the universe and its contents, a spectacle apprehended not by the eye of the body but by the unsleeping eyes of the mind. 50Only let there be the constant and profound longing for wisdom which fills its scholars and disciples with verities glorious in their exceeding loveliness.\u201d When Moses heard this, he did not cease from his desire but kept the yearning for the invisible aflame in his heart.<\/p>\n
ATTITUDE TOWARD PROSELYTES<\/p>\n
51All of like sort to him, all who spurn idle fables and embrace truth in its purity, whether they have been such from the first or through conversion to the better side have reached that higher state, obtain His approval, the former because they were not false to the nobility of their birth, the latter because their judgment led them to make the passage to piety. These last he calls \u201cproselytes,\u201d or newly joined, because they have joined the new and godly.
\n52Thus, while giving equal rank to all in-comers with all the privileges which he gives to the native-born, he exhorts the old nobility to honor them not only with marks of respect but with special friendship and with more than ordinary goodwill. And surely there is good reason for this; they have left, he says, their country, their kinsfolk and their friends for the sake of virtue and religion. Let them not be denied another citizenship or other ties of family and friendship, and let them find places of shelter standing ready for refugees to the camp of piety. For the most effectual love-charm, the chain which binds indissolubly the goodwill which makes us one is to honor the one God.
\n53Yet he counsels them that they must not, presuming on the equal privilege and equal rank which He grants them because they have denounced the vain imaginings of their fathers and ancestors, deal in idle talk or revile with an unbridled tongue the gods whom others acknowledge, lest they on their part be moved to utter profane words against Him Who truly IS. For they know not the difference. And since the falsehood has been taught to them as truth from childhood and has grown up with them, they will go astray.<\/p>\n
ATTITUDE TOWARD APOSTATES<\/p>\n
54But if any members of the nation betray the honor due to the One they should suffer the utmost penalties. They have abandoned their most vital duty, their service in the ranks of piety and religion, have chosen darkness in preference to the brightest light and blindfolded the mind which had the power of keen vision. 55And it is well that all who have a zeal for virtue should be permitted to exact the penalties offhand and with no delay, without bringing the offender before jury or council or any kind of magistrate at all, and give full scope to the feelings which possess them, that hatred of evil and love of God which urges them to inflict punishment without mercy on the impious. They should think that the occasion has made them councilors, jurymen, high sheriffs, members of assembly, accusers, witnesses, laws, people, everything in fact, so that without fear or hindrance they may champion holiness in full security.
\n56There is recorded in the Laws the example of one who acted with this admirable courage. He had seen some persons consorting with foreign women and through the attraction of their love-charms spurning their ancestral customs and seeking admission to the rites of a fabulous religion. One in particular he saw, the chief ringleader of the backsliding, who had the audacity to exhibit his unholy conduct in public and was openly offering sacrifices, a travesty of the name, to images of wood and stone in the presence of the whole people. So, seized with inspired fury, keeping back the throng of spectators on either side, he slew without a qualm him and her, the man because he listened to lessons which it were a gain to unlearn, the woman because she had been the instructor in wickedness. 57This deed suddenly wrought in the heat of excitement acted as a warning to multitudes who were preparing to make the same apostasy. So then God, praising his high achievement, the result of zeal self-prompted and wholehearted, crowned him with a twofold award, the gifts of peace and priesthood, the first because He judged the champion who had battled for the honor of God worthy to claim a life free from war, the second because the guerdon most suitable to a man of piety is the priestly office which professes the service of the Father, bondage to Whom is better not only than freedom but also than kingship.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 1.66\u201373<\/p>\n
\u201cTHE TEMPLE OF GOD\u201d AND \u201cTHE TEMPLE MADE BY HANDS\u201d<\/p>\n
66The highest, and in the truest sense the holy, temple of God is, as we must believe, the whole universe, having for its sanctuary the most sacred part of all existence, even heaven, for its votive ornaments the stars, for its priests the angels who are servitors to His Powers, unbodied souls, not compounds of rational and irrational nature, as ours are, but with the irrational eliminated, all mind through and through, pure intelligences, in the likeness of the monad.67There is also the temple made by hands; for it was right that no check should be given to the forwardness of those who pay their tribute to piety, and desire by means of sacrifices either to give thanks for the blessings that befall them or to ask for pardon and forgiveness for their sins. But he provided that there should not be temples built either in many places or many in the same place, for he judged that since God is one, there should be also only one temple. 68Further, he does not consent to those who wish to perform the rites in their houses, but bids them rise up from the ends of the earth and come to this temple. In this way he also applies the severest test to their dispositions. For one who is not going to sacrifice in a religious spirit would never bring himself to leave his country and friends and kinsfolk and sojourn in a strange land, but clearly it must be the stronger attraction of piety which leads him to endure separation from his most familiar and dearest friends who form as it were a single whole with himself.
\n69And we have the surest proof of this in what actually happens. Countless multitudes from countless cities come, some over land, others over sea, from east and west and north and south at every feast. They take the temple for their port as a general haven and safe refuge from the bustle and great turmoil of life, and there they seek to find calm weather, and, released from the cares whose yoke has been heavy upon them from their earliest years, to enjoy a brief breathing-space in scenes of genial cheerfulness. 70Thus filled with comfortable hopes they devote the leisure, as is their bounden duty to holiness and the honoring of God. Friendships are formed between those who hitherto knew not each other, and the sacrifices and libations are the occasion of reciprocity of feeling and constitute the surest pledge that all are of one mind.<\/p>\n
DESCRIPTION OF THE TEMPLE AREA<\/p>\n
71This temple is enclosed by an outermost wall of very great length and breadth, which gains additional solidity by four porticos so adorned as to present a very costly appearance. Each of them is twofold, and the stone and timber used as its materials and supplied in abundance, combined with the skill of experienced craftsmen and the care bestowed on it by the master-builders, have produced a very perfect piece of work. The inner walls are smaller and in a severer style of architecture. 72Right in the very middle stands the sanctuary itself with a beauty baffling description, to judge from what is exposed to view. For all inside is unseen except by the high priest alone, and indeed he, though charged with the duty of entering once a year, gets no view of anything. For he takes with him a brazier full of lighted coals and incense, and the great quantity of vapor which this naturally gives forth covers everything around it, beclouds the eyesight and prevents it from being able to penetrate to any distance. 73The huge size and height of the sanctuary make it in spite of its comparatively low situation as prominent an object as any of the highest mountains. In fact, so vast are the buildings that they are seen conspicuously and strike the eye with admiration, especially in the case of foreign visitors, who compare them with the architecture of their own public edifices and are amazed both at their beauty and magnificence.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 1.96\u201397<\/p>\n
THE ALLEGORICAL SYMBOLISM OF THE VESTMENTS OF THE HIGH PRIESTS<\/p>\n
96For it expresses the wish first that the High Priest should have in evidence upon him an image of the All, that so by constantly contemplating it he should render his own life worthy of the sum of things, secondly that in performing his holy office he should have the whole universe as his fellow ministrant. And very right and fit it is that he who is consecrated to the Father of the world should take with him also that Father\u2019s son, the universe, for the service of the Creator and Begetter. 97There is also a third truth symbolized by the holy vesture which must not be passed over in silence. Among the other nations the priests are accustomed to offer prayers and sacrifices for their kinsmen and friends and fellow countrymen only, but the high priest of the Jews makes prayers and gives thanks not only on behalf of the whole human race but also for the parts of nature, earth, water, air, fire. For he holds the world to be, as in very truth it is, his country, and in its behalf he is wont to propitiate the Ruler with supplication and intercession, beseeching Him to make His creature a partaker of His own kindly and merciful nature.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 2<\/p>\n
On the special laws which fall under three of the ten general commandments, namely the third on the duty of keeping oaths, the fourth on reverencing the seventh day, and the fifth on honoring parents.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 2.1<\/p>\n
1In the preceding treatise we have dealt fully with two of the ten heads, one directed against the acknowledgement of other sovereign gods, the other against giving divine honors to any work of men\u2019s hands. And we have described such among the particular enactments of the law as may be properly classed under either head. Let us now discuss the three next in the list, again subjoining those of the special ordinances which belong to them.\u2026<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 2.39\u201342, 46\u201348<\/p>\n
THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT<\/p>\n
39The next head is concerned with the sacred seventh day. Under this head are included a great number of matters of vital importance, the different kinds of feasts; the release in the seventh year of persons who were naturally free but through times of adversity are in servitude; the charity shown by creditors to debtors in canceling loans to their fellow nationals, this also in the seventh year; the rest allowed both in the lowlands and the uplands to the fertile soil at intervals of six years; and the laws laid down with respect to the fiftieth year. The mere recital of all these is enough to make the naturally gifted perfect in virtue without any effort on their part and to produce some degree of obedience in the rebellious and hard-natured.
\n40Now the part played by seven among the numbers has been described at length in an earlier place, where we have discussed the properties which it possesses within the decad, and its close connection with ten itself, and with four, which is the origin and source of ten. Also we have shown how a sevenfold addition of successive numbers beginning with unity produces twenty-eight, a perfect number, equal to the sum of its factors; again, how when brought into a geometrical progression, it produces simultaneously a square and a cube, besides the numberless other beautiful results which the study of it reveals. On these numerical points we must not linger at the present juncture, but we must examine each specific subject which lies before us included under the general head, beginning with the first; and the first subject, as we saw, is the feasts.<\/p>\n
THE TEN FEASTS\u2014THEIR ENUMERATION<\/p>\n
41There are in all ten feasts which are recorded in the law. The first, the mention of which may perhaps cause some surprise, is the feast of every day. The second is that held on the seventh day with six days between, called by the Hebrews in their native tongue Sabbath. The third is the new moon which follows the conjunction of the moon with the sun. The fourth is the \u201cCrossing\u201d festival called Pascha. The fifth is the offering of the first ears, the sacred Sheaf. The sixth is the Unleavened Bread. Then comes what is emphatically a seventh, being the feast of Sevens or Weeks. Eighth is the Sacred-month-day, ninth is the Fast, tenth the feast of Tabernacles which concludes the yearly festivals and thus ends up with a perfect number ten. We must begin with the first of these.<\/p>\n
THE FESTIVAL OF \u201cEVERY DAY\u201d<\/p>\n
42When the law records that every day is a festival, it accommodates itself to the blameless life of righteous men who follow nature and her ordinances \u2026 XIII 46 \u2026 such men, we say, in the delight of their virtues, naturally make their whole life a feast. 47These are indeed but a small number, left in their cities like an ember of wisdom to smolder, that virtue may not be altogether extinguished and lost to our race. 48But if only everywhere men had thought and felt as these few, and become what nature intended them to be, all of them blameless and guiltless and lovers of sound sense, rejoicing in moral excellence just because it is what it is, and counting it the only true good and all the other goods but slaves and vassals, subject to their authority, the cities would have been brimful of happiness, utterly free from all that causes grief and fears, and packed with what produces joys and states of well-being, so that each season as it comes would give full opportunity for cheerful living and the whole cycle of the year would be a feast.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 2.56\u201364<\/p>\n
THE SABBATH AND OTHER \u201cSEVENS\u201d<\/p>\n
56After this continuous unbroken feast which has neither beginning nor end, the second to be observed is the sacred seventh day, recurring with six days between. Some have given it the name of virgin, having before their eyes its surpassing chastity. They also call her the motherless, begotten by the father of the universe alone, the ideal form of the male sex with nothing of the female. It is the manliest and doughtiest of numbers, well gifted by nature for sovereignty and leadership \u2026 57For seven is a factor common to all the phenomena which stand highest in the world of sensible things and serve to consummate in due order transitions of the year and recurring seasons. Such are the seven planets, the Great Bear, the Pleiades and the cycles of the moon, as it waxes and wanes, and the movements, harmonious and grand beyond description, of the other heavenly bodies. 58But Moses from a higher point of view gave it the name of completion and full perfection when he laid down six as the number under which the parts of the universe were brought into being, seven as that under which they were perfected. For six is even-odd, formed out of twice three with the odd part as its male element and the even as its feminine, and these two, by the immutable laws of nature, are the sources of generation. 59But seven is a number entirely uncompounded, and may be quite properly described as the light of six. For seven reveals as completed what six has produced, and therefore it may be quite rightly entitled the birthday of the world, whereon the Father\u2019s perfect work, compounded of perfect parts, was revealed as what it was.<\/p>\n
ABSTENTION FROM WORK ON THE SABBATH DAY<\/p>\n
60On this day we are commanded to abstain from all work, not because the law inculcates slackness; on the contrary it always inures men to endure hardship and incites them to labor, and spurns those who would idle their time away, and accordingly is plain in its directions to work the full six days. Its object is rather to give men relaxation from continuous and unending toil and by refreshing their bodies with a regularly calculated system of remissions, to send them out renewed to their old activities. For a breathing-space enables not merely ordinary people but athletes also to collect their strength and with a stronger force behind them to undertake promptly and patiently each of the tasks set before them. 61Further, when He forbids bodily labor on the seventh day, He permits the exercise of the higher activities, namely, those employed in the study of the principles of virtue\u2019s lore. For the law bids us to take the time for studying philosophy and thereby improve the soul and the dominant mind. 62So each seventh day there stand wide open in every city thousands of schools of good sense, temperance, courage, justice and the other virtues, in which the scholars sit in order quietly, with ears alert and with full attention, so much do they thirst for the draught which the teacher\u2019s words supply, while one of special experience rises and sets forth what is the best, and sure to be profitable and will make the whole of life grow to something better. 63But among the vast number of the particular truths and principles there studied, there stand out practically high above the others, two main heads: one of duty to God as shown by piety and holiness, one of duty to men as shown by humanity and justice, each of them splitting up into multiform branches, all highly laudable. 64These things show clearly that Moses does not allow any of those who use his sacred instruction to remain inactive at any season. But since we consist of body and soul, he assigned to the body its proper tasks and similarly to the soul what falls to its share, and his earnest desire was, that the two should be waiting to relieve each other. Thus while the body is working, the soul enjoys a respite, but when the body takes its rest, the soul resumes its work, and thus the best forms of life, the theoretical and the practical, take their turn in replacing each other. The practical life has six as its number allotted for ministering to the body. The theoretical has seven for knowledge and perfection of the mind.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 2.65\u2013110<\/p>\n
PROHIBITIONS<\/p>\n
65It is forbidden to light any fire on this day, fire being regarded as the source and origin of life, since without it nothing can be executed which serves the requirements necessary for existence \u2026 69But the holiday of the Sabbath is given by the law not only to servants but also to the cattle \u2026 70There is no need to go through the rest of the list, when even the ox who serves the most useful and indispensable purposes in human life, namely ploughing when the soil is prepared for the sowing, and again thrashing when the sheaves are brought in for the purging of the fruit, is then kept free from the yoke and enjoys the birthday festival of the world. So universally has the sanctity of the day extended its influence.<\/p>\n
CANCELLATION OF DEBTS<\/p>\n
71So high is the reverence which he assigns to the seventh day that other things which share in the qualities of the number are honored in his estimation. Thus he lays down a rule for cancellation of debts in every seventh year, both as a succor to the poor and as a challenge to the rich to show humanity, in order that by giving some share of their own to the needy they may expect to receive the same kindness themselves, if any disaster befall them. Human vicissitudes are manifold, and life is not always on the same anchorage, but is like an unsteady wind, ever veering round to the opposite quarter. 72Now the best course would be that the creditors\u2019 liberality should be extended to all debtors \u2026 73He does not allow them to exact money from their fellow-nationals, but does permit the recovery of dues from the others. He distinguishes the two by calling the first by the appropriate name of brethren, suggesting that none should grudge to give of his own to those whom nature has made his brothers and fellow-heirs. Those who are not of the same nation he describes as aliens, reasonably enough, and the condition of the alien excludes any idea of partnership, unless indeed by a transcendency of virtues he converts even it, into a tie of kinship, since it is a general truth, that common citizenship rests on virtues and laws which propound the morally beautiful as the sole good?<\/p>\n
ASIDE: TIRADE AGAINST CRUELTY OF MONEYLENDERS<\/p>\n
74Now lending money on interest is a blameworthy action, for a person who borrows is not living on a superabundance of means, but is obviously in need, and since he is compelled to pay the interest as well as the capital, he must necessarily be in the utmost straits. And while he thinks he is being benefited by the loan, he is actually like senseless animals, suffering further damage from the bait which is set before him.<\/p>\n
ASIDE: ATTACK ON CRUEL MONEYLENDERS<\/p>\n
75I ask you, Sir Moneylender, why do you disguise your want of a partner\u2019s feeling by pretending to act as a partner? Why do you assume outwardly a kindly and charitable appearance but display in your actions inhumanity and a savage brutality, exacting more than you lend, sometimes double, reducing the pauper to further depths of poverty? 76And therefore no one sympathizes when in your eagerness for larger gains you lose your capital as well. In their glee all call you extortioner and money-grubber and other similar terms, you who have lain in wait for the misfortunes of others, and regarded their ill-luck as your own good luck. 77It has been said that vice has no sense of sight; so too the moneylender is blind, and has no vision of the time of repayment, when it will hardly be possible, if at all, to obtain what he has expected to gain by his greed. 78Such a person may well pay the penalty of his avarice by receiving back merely what he provided, and learn not to make a trade of other people\u2019s misfortunes and enrich himself in improper ways. And the borrowers should be granted the privilege of the law\u2019s charity, and pay neither simple nor compound interest, but just the principal. For later, as the proper occasion arise, they will make the same sacrifice to their present creditors and requite with equal assistance those who were the first to bestow the benefit.<\/p>\n
THE MANUMISSION OF HEBREW SLAVES<\/p>\n
79After ordinances of this sort he follows them by laying down a law which breathes kindness and humanity throughout. \u201cIf,\u201d he says, \u201cone of your brethren is sold to you, let him continue in slavery for six years but in the seventh be set free without payment.\u201d 80Here again he uses the term brother of a fellow-national, and by this name indirectly sows in the soul of the owner the thoughts of his close relationship to the person in his power. It bids him not despise him as a stranger who has no charm to win his affection, but allow the lesson which the holy word suggests to create a preliminary sense of kinship, and thus feel no resentment at his approaching liberation. 81For people in this position, though we find them called slaves, are in reality laborers who undertake the service just to procure themselves the necessaries of life, however much some may bluster about the rights of absolute power which they exercise over them. 82We must abate their truculence by repeating these excellent injunctions of the law. The man whom you call a slave, my friend, is a hired person, himself too a man, ultimately your kinsman, further of the same nation, perhaps also of the same tribe and ward, reduced to the guise which he now adopts by actual need. 83Expel, then, from your soul that evil and malignant thing, arrogance. Deal with him as your hired servant, both in what you give and what you take. As for the latter, he will render you his services without the slightest backwardness always and everywhere without procrastination, and anticipate your orders with zeal and rapidity. And you must give him in return food and raiment and take care for his other needs. Do not harness him like an unreasoning animal nor oppress him with weights too heavy and too numerous for his capacity, nor heap insults upon him, nor drag him down by threats and menaces into cruel despondency. Rather grant him time and places for respite according to some regular rule. For while \u201cnot too much of anything\u201d is an excellent maxim in every case, it is particularly so between masters and servants. 84When however you have received his services for the fullest term required, namely, six years, and when the truly sacred number of the seventh year is about to begin, grant his freedom to him who is naturally free and grant it without hesitation, my friend, and rejoice that you have found an opportunity of benefiting the highest of living creatures, man, in his chief interest. For a slave can have no greater boon than freedom. 85Be glad, too, to crown your benefaction by bestowing something of each of your various kinds of property to start him on his way. For it is a praise to you that he should not leave your home penniless but well stocked in resources to procure what is necessary. Otherwise the same thing may happen again. He may be reduced by need to his old unhappy plight and compelled to undertake slavery again through lack of the means of life, and the boon you bestowed upon him may be cancelled. So much for the poor.<\/p>\n
SHEMITAH (THE SABBATICAL YEAR)<\/p>\n
86Then follows a commandment to let the land lie fallow during the seventh year. There are several reasons for this. In the first place he wished to give seven its honorable position in all the series in which time is measured, namely, days, months and years. For every seventh day is holy, a Sabbath as the Hebrews call it, and it is in the seventh month in every year that the chief of all the feasts falls and therefore naturally the seventh year also has been marked out for a share in the dignity which belongs to the number. 87And there is this second reason. Do not, he says, be entirely under the power of lucre but submit voluntarily to some loss, so that you may find it easy to bear some involuntary injury, if ever it should occur, instead of resenting it as some strange and alien misfortune and falling into despair. For some of the rich are so poor-spirited that when adversity overtakes them, they are as mournful and depressed as if they had been robbed of their whole substance. 88But among the followers of Moses all who have been his true disciples, trained in his excellent institutions from their earliest years, by allowing even rich territory to lie idle inure themselves to bear privations calmly and by the lesson of magnanimity thus learned voluntarily and deliberately to let even undoubted sources of wealth fall almost from their very hands.<\/p>\n
ASIDE: EVILS OF TAX GATHERERS<\/p>\n
89There is also, I think, this third suggestion, that men should absolutely abstain from putting any oppressive burden upon anyone else. For if the different parts of the earth which cannot share in any sensations of pain or pleasure yet have to be given respite, how much more must this be the ease with men who not only possess the sense which is common also to the irrational animals but even the special gift of reason through which the painful feelings caused by toil and labor stamp and record themselves in mental pictures, more vivid than mere sensation! 90Let so-called masters therefore cease from imposing upon their slaves severe and scarcely endurable orders, which break down their bodies by violent usage and force the soul to collapse before the body. 91You need not grudge to moderate your orders. The result will be that you yourselves will enjoy proper attention and that your servants will carry out their orders readily and accept their duties not just for a short time, to be abandoned through wearying too quickly, and, indeed, we may say, as if old age had prematurely overtaken them in their labors. On the contrary, they will prolong their youth to the utmost, like athletes, not those who fatten themselves up into full fleshiness, but those who regularly train themselves by \u201cdry sweatings\u201d to acquire what is necessary and useful for life.
\n92So too let rulers of cities cease from racking them with taxes and tolls as heavy as they are constant. Such rulers both fill their own coffers and while hoarding money hoard also illiberal vices which defile the whole of civic life. 93For they purposely choose as tax-gatherers the most ruthless of men, brimful of inhumanity \u2026 These persons add to their natural brutality the immunity they gain from their masters\u2019 instructions, and in their determination to accommodate every action to those masters\u2019 pleasure, they leave no severity untried, however barbarous, and banish mercy and gentleness even from their dreams. 94And therefore in carrying out their collecting they create universal chaos and confusion and apply their exactions not merely to the property of their victims but also to their bodies, on which they inflict insults and outrages and forms of torture quite original in their savagery. Indeed, I have heard of persons who, actuated by abnormal frenzy and cruelty, have not even spared the dead, persons who become so utterly brutalized that they venture even to flog corpses with whips.
\n95And when anyone censured the extraordinary cruelty shown in refusing to allow even death, the release and in very truth the \u201cend\u201d of all ills, to procure freedom from insult for those who are now beyond its reach, and in causing them to undergo outrage instead of the normal rites of burial, the line of defense adopted was worse than the accusation. They treated the dead, they said, with such contempt not for the useless purpose of insulting the deaf and senseless dust but in order to excite the pity of those who were related to them by birth or some other tie of fellowship, and thus urge them to ransom the bodies of their friends by making a final gift in payment for them.
\n96Foolish, foolish people, I would say to them, have you not first learnt the lesson which you teach, or are you competent to induce others to show pity, even with the cruelest actions before them, when you have exscinded all kindly and humane feelings from your own souls? And this you have done, though you had no lack of good advisers, particularly in our laws, which have relieved even the land from its yearly tolls and provided it with a rest and respite.
\n97This land, though to all appearance a lifeless thing, is put into a condition to make its requital and to repay a boon which it received as a free gift but is now eager to return. For the immunity which it has during the seventh year and its rest from labor and complete freedom during the whole annual cycle give it a fertility in the next year which causes it to bear twice as much or even many times as much as in the previous years. 98We may also note that the trainers of athletes take much the same line in dealing with their pupils. When they have thoroughly drilled them by an unbroken course of exercises, before they reach the point of exhaustion, they give them a fresh lease of life by providing relaxations not only from the labor of the training itself but from the dietary regulations as to food and drink, the hardships of which they abate in order to make the soul cheerful and the body comfortable. 99And we must not suppose that here we have the professional trainers to hard work appearing as instructors in slackness and luxury; they are following a scientific method by which further strength and power is given to what is already strong and powerful, and vigor enhanced as though it were a harmony by alternating relaxation with tension. 100This truth I have learnt from the never-failing wisdom of nature who, knowing how toil-worn and weary our race becomes, divided our time into day and night, giving the hours of wakefulness to one, and of sleep to the other. 101For, most careful of mothers, her anxious thought was that her children should not be exhausted. In the daylight she wakens our bodies and stimulates them to carry out all the offices and demands of life, and reproaches those who are making it their practice to loiter through life in an idle and voluptuous way. But at night she sounds the recall as in war and summons them to repose and take care of their bodies. 102And men casting off all the sore burden of affairs which has lain heavy upon them from morn till eve, turn homeward and betake themselves to rest, and in the deep sleep which falls upon them cast off the distempers of their daylight troubles, and then again unwearied and full of fresh vigor hasten eagerly each to his own familiar occupation. 103This double course nature has assigned to men by means of sleeping and waking with the result that by alternating activity with inaction they have increased readiness and nimbleness in the various parts of their bodies.<\/p>\n
SUMMING UP<\/p>\n
104These considerations the prophetic author of our laws had before his eyes when he proclaimed a rest for the land and made the husbandman stay his work after six years. But he gave this enactment not only on the grounds which I have mentioned but also moved by that habitual kindliness which he aims at infusing in every part of his legislation, thereby impressing on the readers of the sacred Scriptures the stamp of good and neighborly customs. 105For he forbids them to close up any field during the seventh year. All olive yards and vineyards are to be left wide open and so with the other kinds of property, whether of sown crops or orchard trees, thus giving an unrestricted use of such fruits as are of natural growth to the poor, quite as much, if not more so, than to the owners. 106Thus on the one hand he did not allow the masters to do any work of tillage because he wished to avoid giving them the painful feeling that they had incurred the expenditure but did not receive the income in return, and on the other hand he thought fit that the poor should for this year at any rate enjoy as their own what appeared to belong to others, and in this way took from them any appearance of humiliation or possibility of being reproached as beggars. 107May not our passionate affection well go out to laws charged with such kindly feeling, which teaches the rich to give liberally and share what they have with others and encourages the poor not to be always dancing attendance on the houses of the wealthy, as though compelled to resort thither to make up their own deficiency, but sometimes also to come claiming a source of wealth in the fruits which, as I have said, develop untilled and which they can treat as their own?
\n108Widows and orphans and all others who are neglected and ignored because they have no surplus of income, have at this time such a surplus, and find themselves suddenly affluent through the gifts of God, Who invites them to share with the owners under the sanction of the holy number seven. 109And indeed all stock-breeders feel at liberty to take out their own cattle in search of pasturage and to select meadowland of good herbage and particularly suitable for grazing their beasts. Thus they take full advantage of the immunity secured by the time of freedom. And this is not opposed by any grudging on the master\u2019s side. They are under the sway of a very ancient custom, which through long familiarity has won its way to the standing of nature.
\n110While laying down this first foundation of moderation and humanity, he built on it by adding years to the number of seven times seven and consecrated the whole of the fiftieth year. This he made the subject of many special enactments, all of remarkable excellence, apart from those which are common to other seventh years.<\/p>\n
THE NEW MOON<\/p>\n
140Following the order stated above, we record the third type of feast which we will proceed to explain. This is the New Moon, or beginning of the lunar month, namely the period between one conjunction and the next, the length of which has been accurately calculated in the astronomical schools. The new moon holds its place among the feasts for many reasons. First, because it is the beginning of the month, and the beginning, both in number and in time, deserves honor. Secondly, because when it arrives, nothing in heaven is left without light, for while at the conjunction, when the moon is lost to sight under the sun, the side which faces earth is darkened, when the new month begins it resumes its natural brightness. 141The third reason is, that the stronger or more powerful element at that time supplies the help which is needed to the smaller and weaker. For it is just then that the sun begins to illumine the moon with the light which we perceive and the moon reveals its own beauty to the eye. And this is surely an obvious lesson inculcating kindness and humanity and bidding men never grudge their own good things, but imitating the blessed and happy beings in heaven banish jealousy from the confines of the soul, producing what they have for all to see, treat it as common property, and give freely to the deserving. 142The fourth reason is, that the moon traverses the zodiac in a shorter fixed period than any other heavenly body. For it accomplishes that revolution in the span of a single month, and therefore the conclusion of its circuit, when the moon ends its course at the starting point at which it began, is honored by the law, which declares that day a feast, again to teach us an admirable lesson, that in the conduct of life we should make the ends correspond with the beginnings. And this will be effected if we keep our primitive appetites under the control of reason and do not permit them to rebel and riot like cattle that have no herdsman.
\n143As for the services that the moon renders to everything on earth, there is no need to dilate upon them. The proofs are perfectly clear. As the moon increases, the rivers and fountains rise, and again diminish as it diminishes. Its phases cause the seas to withdraw and dwindle at the ebb tide, then suddenly rush back with the returning flood, and the air to undergo all manner of changes as the sky becomes clear or cloudy and alters in other ways. The fruits, both of the sown crops and orchard trees, grow to their maturity according to the revolutions of the moon, which fosters and ripens everything that grows with the dewy and very gentle breezes which it brings. 144But, as I have said, this is not the time to dwell at length on the praises of the moon and record and catalogue the services which it renders to living creatures and everything on earth. It is for these or similar reasons that the New Moon is honored and obtains its place among the feasts.<\/p>\n
PASCHA\/PASSOVER\/THE CROSSING-FEAST<\/p>\n
145After the New Moon comes the fourth feast, called the Crossing-feast, which the Hebrews in their native tongue call Pascha. In this festival many myriads of victims from noon till eventide are offered by the whole people, old and young alike, raised for that particular day to the dignity of the priesthood.For at other times the priests according to the ordinance of the law carry out both the public sacrifices and those offered by private individuals. But on this occasion the whole nation performs the sacred rites and acts as priest with pure hands and complete immunity. 146The reason for this is as follows: the festival is a reminder and thank offering for that great migration from Egypt which was made by more than two million men and women in obedience to the oracles vouchsafed to them. Now at that time they had left a land brimful of inhumanity which made a practice of expelling strangers, and what was worst of all, assigned divine honors to irrational creatures, not merely domesticated animals, but even wild beasts. So exceedingly joyful were they that in their vast enthusiasm and impatient eagerness, they naturally enough sacrificed without waiting for their priest. This practice which on that occasion was the result of a spontaneous and instinctive emotion, was sanctioned by the law once in every year to remind them of their duty of thanksgiving. These are the facts as discovered by the study of ancient history.
\n147But to those who are accustomed to turn literal facts into allegory, the Crossing-festival suggests the purification of the soul. They say that the lover of wisdom is occupied solely in crossing from the body and the passions, each of which overwhelms him like a torrent, unless the rushing current be dammed and held back by the principles of virtue.
\n148On this day every dwelling-house is invested with the outward semblance and dignity of a temple. The victim is then slaughtered and dressed for the festal meal which befits the occasion. The guests assembled for the banquet have been cleansed by purificatory lustrations, and are there not as in other festive gatherings, to indulge the belly with wine and viands, but to fulfill with prayers and hymns the custom handed down by their fathers. 149The day on which this national festivity occurs may very properly be noted. It is the 14th of the month, a number formed of the sum of two sevens, thus bringing out the fact that seven never fails to appear in anything worthy of honor but everywhere takes the lead in conferring prestige and dignity.
\n150With the Crossing-feast he combines one in which the food consumed is of a different and unfamiliar kind, namely, unleavened bread, which also gives its name to the feast. This may be regarded from two points of view, one peculiar to the nation, referring to the migration just mentioned, the other universal, following the lead of nature, and in agreement with the general cosmic order. To show that this affirmation is absolutely true, will require some examination. This month comes seventh in order and number as judged by the cycle of the sun, but in importance it is first, and therefore is described as first in the sacred books.151The reason for this I believe to be as follows. In the spring equinox we have a kind of likeness and portraiture of that first epoch in which this world was created. The elements were then separated and placed in harmonious order with reference to themselves and each other. The heaven was adorned with sun and moon and the rhythmic movements and circlings of the other stars, both fixed and planetary. So too the earth was adorned with every manner of plants, and the uplands and lowlands, wherever the soil had depth and goodness, became luxuriant and verdant. 152So every year God reminds us of the creation of the world by setting before our eyes the spring when everything blooms and flowers. And therefore there is good reason for describing it in the laws as the first month because in a sense it is an image of the primal origin reproduced from it like the imprint from an archetypal seal. 153But the month of the autumnal equinox, though first in order as measured by the course of the sun, is not called first in the law, because at that time all the fruits have been gathered in and the trees are shedding their leaves and all the bloom which the spring brought in its prime already scorched by the heat of the summer sun is wilting under the dry currents of air. 154And so to give the name of \u201cfirst\u201d to a month in which both uplands and lowlands are sterilized and unfruitful seemed to him altogether unsuitable and incongruous. For things which come first and head the list should be associated with all the fairest and most desirable things which are the sources of birth and increase to animals and fruits and plants, not with the processes of destruction and the dark thoughts which it suggests. 155The feast begins at the middle of the month, on the fifteenth day, when the moon is full, a day purposely chosen because then there is no darkness, but everything is continuously lighted up as the sun shines from morning to evening and the moon from evening to morning and while the stars give place to each other no shadow is cast upon their brightness.
\n156Again, the feast is held for seven days to mark the precedence and honor which the number holds in the universe, indicating that nothing which tends to cheerfulness and public mirth and thankfulness to God should fail to be accompanied with memories of the sacred seven which He intended to be the source and fountain to men of all good things. 157Two days out of the seven, the first and the last, are declared holy. In this way he gave a natural precedence to the beginning and the end; but he also wished to create a harmony as on a musical instrument between the intermediates and the extremes. Perhaps too he wished to harmonize the feast with a past which adjoins the first day and a future which adjoins the last. These two, the first and the last, have each the other\u2019s properties in addition to their own. The first is the beginning of the feast and the end of the preceding past, the seventh is the end of the feast and the beginning of the coming future. Thus, as I have said before, the whole life of the man of worth may be regarded as equivalent to a feast held by one who has expelled grief and fear and desire and the other passions and distempers of the soul.
\n158The bread is unleavened either because our forefathers, when under divine guidance they were starting on their migration, were so intensely hurried that they brought the lumps of dough unleavened, or else because at that season, namely, the springtime, when the feast is held, the fruit of the corn has not reached its perfection, for the fields are in the ear stage and not yet mature for harvest. It was the imperfection of this fruit which belonged to the future, though it was to reach its perfection very shortly, that he considered might be paralleled by the unleavened food, which is also imperfect, and serves to remind us of the comforting hope that nature, possessing as she does a superabundant wealth of things needful, is already preparing her yearly gifts to the human race. 159Another suggestion made by the interpreters of the Holy Scriptures is that food, when unleavened, is a gift of nature, when leavened is a work of art. For men in their eagerness to temper the barely necessary with the pleasant, have learned through practice to soften by art what nature has made hard. 160Since, then, the spring-time feast, as I have laid down, is a reminder of the creation of the world, and its earliest inhabitants, children of earth in the first or second generation, must have used the gifts of the universe in their unperverted state before pleasure had got the mastery, he ordained for use on this occasion the food most fully in accordance with the season. He wished every year to rekindle the embers of the serious and ascetic mode of faring, and to employ the leisure of a festal assembly to confer admiration and honor on the old-time life of frugality and economy, and as far as possible to assimilate our present-day life to that of the distant past. 161These statements are especially guaranteed by the exposure of the twelve loaves corresponding in number to the tribes, on the holy table. They are all unleavened, the clearest possible example of a food free from admixture, in the preparation of which art for the sake of pleasure has no place, but only nature, providing nothing save what is indispensable for its use. So much for this.<\/p>\n
THE SHEAF<\/p>\n
162But within the feast there is another feast following directly after the first day. This is called \u201cthe Sheaf,\u201d a name given to it from the ceremony which consists in bringing to the altar a sheaf as a firstfruit, both of the land, which has been given to the nation to dwell in, and of the whole earth, so that it serves that purpose both to the nation in particular and for the whole human race in general. 163The reason of this is that the Jewish nation is to the whole inhabited world what the priest is to the State. For the holy office in very truth belongs to the nation because it carries out all the rites of purification and both in body and soul obeys the injunctions of the divine laws, which restrict the pleasures of the belly and the parts below it and the horde \u2026 setting reason to guide the irrational senses, and also check and rein in the wild and extravagant impulses of the soul, sometimes through gentler remonstrances and philosophical admonitions, sometimes through severer and more forcible condemnations and the fear of punishment which they hold over it as a deterrent.
\n164But not only is the legislation in a sense a lesson on the sacred office, not only does a life led in conformity with the laws necessarily confer priesthood or rather high priesthood in the judgment of truth, but there is another point of special importance. There is no bound or limit to the number of deities, male and female, honored in different cities, the vain inventions of the tribe of poets and of the great multitude of men to whom the quest for truth is a task of difficulty and beyond their powers of research. Yet instead of all peoples having the same gods, we find different nations venerating and honoring different gods. The gods of the foreigner they do not regard as gods at all. They treat their acceptance by the others as a jest and a laughing-stock and denounce the extreme folly of those who honor them and the failure to think soundly shown thereby. 165But if He exists Whom all Greeks and barbarians unanimously acknowledge, the supreme Father of gods and men and the Maker of the whole universe, whose nature is invisible and inscrutable not only by the eye, but by the mind, yet is a matter into which every student of astronomical science and other philosophy desires to make research and leaves nothing untried which would help him to discern it and do it service\u2014then it was the duty of all men to cleave to Him and not introduce new gods staged as by machinery to receive the same honors. 166When they went wrong in what was the most vital matter of all, it is the literal truth that the error which the rest committed was corrected by the Jewish nation which passed over all created objects because they were created and naturally liable to destruction, and chose the service only of the Uncreated and Eternal, first because of its excellence, secondly because it is profitable to dedicate and attach ourselves to the elder rather than to the younger, to the ruler rather than to the subject, to the maker rather than to the thing created. 167And therefore it astonishes me to see that some people venture to accuse of inhumanity the nation which has shown so profound a sense of fellowship and goodwill to all men everywhere, by using its prayers and festivals and firstfruit offerings as a means of supplication for the human race in general and of making its homage to the truly existent God in the name of those who have evaded the service which it was their duty to give, as well as of itself.
\n168So much for this feast as a thanksgiving for the whole human race. But the nation in particular also gives thanks for many reasons. First, because they do not continue forever wandering broadcast over islands and continents and occupying the homelands of others as strangers and vagrants, open to the reproach of waiting to seize the goods of others. Nor have they just borrowed a section of this great country for lack of means to purchase, but have acquired the land and cities for their own property, a heritage in which they live as long established citizens and therefore offer firstfruits from it as a sacred duty. 169Secondly, the land which has fallen to their lot is not derelict nor indifferent soil, but good land, well fitted for breeding domestic animals and bearing fruits in vast abundance. For in it there is no poverty of soil and even such parts as seem to be stony or stubborn are intersected by soft veins of very great depth, the richness of which adapts them for producing life. 170But besides this, it was no uninhabited land which they received, but one which contained a populous nation and great cities filled with stalwart citizens. Yet these cities have been stripped of their inhabitants and the whole nation, except for a small fraction, has disappeared, partly through wars, partly through heaven-sent visitations, a consequence of their strange and monstrous practices of iniquity and all their heinous acts of impiety aimed at the subversion of the statutes of nature. Thus should those who took their place as inhabitants gain instruction from the evil fate of others and learn from their history the lesson that if they emulate deeds of vice they will suffer the same doom, but if they pay honor to a life of virtue they will possess the heritage appointed to them and be ranked not as settlers but as native-born.
\n171We have shown, then, that the Sheaf was an offering both of the nation\u2019s own land and of the whole earth, given in thanks for the fertility and abundance which the nation and the whole human race desired to enjoy. But we must not fail to note that there are many things of great advantage represented by the offering. First, that we remember God, and what thing more perfectly good can we find than this? Secondly, that we make requital, as is most fully due, to Him Who is the true cause of the good harvest. 172For the results due to the husbandman\u2019s art are few or as good as nothing, furrows drawn, a plant dug or ringed around, a trench deepened, excessive overgrowth lopped, or other similar operations. But what we owe to nature is all indispensable and useful, a soil of great fruitfulness, fields irrigated by fountains or rivers, spring-fed or winter torrents, and watered by seasonable rains, happily tempered states of the air which sends us the breath of its truly life-giving breezes, numberless varieties of crops and plants. For which of these has man for its inventor or parent? 173No, it is nature, their parent, who has not grudged to man a share in the goods which are her very own, but judging him to be the chiefest of mortal animals because he has obtained a portion of reason and good sense, chose him as the worthiest and invited him to share what was hers to give. For all this, it is meet and right that the hospitality of God should be praised and revered, God Who provides for His guests the whole earth as a truly hospitable home ever filled not merely with necessaries, but with the means of luxurious living. 174Further, we learn not to neglect benefactors, for he who is grateful to God, Who needs nothing and is His own fullness, will thus become accustomed to be grateful to men whose needs are numberless.
\n175The sheaf thus offered is of barley, showing that the use of the inferior grains is not open to censure. It would be irreverent to give firstfruits of them all, as most of them are made to give pleasure rather than to be used as necessaries, and equally unlawful to enjoy and partake of any form of food for which thanks had not been offered in the proper and rightful manner. And therefore the law ordained that the firstfruit offerings should be made of barley, a species of grain regarded as holding the second place in value as food. For wheat holds the first place and as the firstfruit of this has greater distinction, the law postponed it to a more suitable season in the future. It does not anticipate matters, but puts it in storage for the time being, so that the various thank offerings may be adjusted to their appointed dates as they recur.<\/p>\n
SHAVU\u2019OT\/THE FEAST OF WEEKS<\/p>\n
176The festival of the Sheaf, which has all these grounds of precedence, indicated in the law, is also in fact anticipatory of another greater feast. For it is from it that the fiftieth day is reckoned, by counting seven sevens, which are then crowned with the sacred number by the monad, which is an incorporeal image of God, Whom it resembles because it also stands alone. This is the primary excellence exhibited by fifty, but there is another which should be mentioned. 177One reason among others which makes its nature so marvelous and admirable is that it is formed by what the mathematicians tell us is the most elemental and venerable of existing things, namely, the right-angled triangle. In length its sides are 5, 3, 4, of which the sum is twelve, the pattern of the zodiac cycle, the duplication of the highly prolific six, which is the starting point of perfection since it is the sum of the factors which produce it through multiplication. But we find that the sides when raised to the second power, i.e., 3\u00d73 + 4\u00d74 + 5\u00d75, make 50, so that we must say that 50 is superior to 12 in the same degree as the second power is superior to the first. 178And if the lesser of these is represented by the most excellent of the heavenly spheres, the zodiac, the greater, namely 50, must be the pattern of some quite superior form of existence. But a discussion of this would be out of place at this point. It is quite enough for the present to call attention to the difference, so as to avoid treating a prominent fact as of secondary importance.
\n179The feast which is held when the number 50 is reached has acquired the title of \u201cfirst-products.\u201d On it is the custom to bring two leavened loaves of wheaten bread for a sample offering of that kind of grain as the best form of food. One explanation of the name, \u201cFeast of First-Products,\u201d is that the first produce of the young wheat and the earliest fruit to appear is brought as a sample offering before the year\u2019s harvest comes to be used by men. 180It is no doubt just, and a religious duty, that those who have received freely a generous supply of sustenance so necessary and wholesome and also palatable in the highest degree should not enjoy or taste it at all until they have brought a sample offering to the Donor, not indeed as a gift, for all things and possessions and gifts are His, but as a token, however small, by which they show a disposition of thankfulness and loyalty to Him Who, while He needs no favors, sends the showers of His favors in never-failing constancy. 181Another reason for the name may be that wheaten grain is pre-eminent as the first and best product, all the other sown crops ranking in the second class in comparison; for as an archon in a city or a pilot in a ship are said to be the first because they regulate the course of the city or the ship, as the case may be, so wheaten grain has received the compound name of \u201cfirst-product\u201d because it is the best of all the cereals, which it would not be unless it were also the food used by the best of living creatures. 182The loaves are leavened in spite of the prohibition against bringing leaven to the altar, not to produce any contradiction in the ordinances, but to ensure that so to speak there shall be a single kind, both for receiving and giving. By receiving I mean the thanksgiving of the offerers, by giving the immediate return without any delay to the offerers of what they bring, though not for their own use. 183For food that has once been consecrated will be used by those who have the right and authority, and that right belongs to those who act as priests who through the beneficence of the law have the right to partake of any thing brought to the altar which is not consumed by the undying fire\u2014a privilege granted either as a payment for officiating or as a prize for the contests which they endure in the cause of piety, or a sacred allotment in lieu of land, in the apportionment of which they had not received their proper share like the other tribes.
\n184But leaven is also a symbol for two other things: in one way it stands for food in its most complete and perfect form, such that in our daily usage none is found to be superior or more nourishing, and as wheat-meal is superior to that of the other seed crops, its excellence demands that the offering made in recognition of it should be of the same high quality. 185The other point is more symbolical. Everything that is leavened rises, and joy is the rational elevation or rising of the soul. And there is nothing that exists which more naturally gives a man joy than the possession in generous abundance of necessaries. Such rightly call forth gladness and thanksgiving in those who by the leavened loaves give outward expression to the invisible sense of well-being in their hearts.
\n186The offering takes the form of loaves instead of wheaten meal, because when the wheat has come there is nothing still missing in the way of appetizing food. For we are told that of all the seed crops, wheat is the last to spring up and be ready for harvesting. 187And these thank offerings of the best kind are two in number for the two kinds of time, the past and the future; for the past, because our days have been spent in abundance, free from the experience of the evils of want and famine; for the future, because we have laid by and prepared resources to meet it, and are full of bright hopes while we dispense and bring out for daily use the gifts of God as they are needed by the rules of good economy.<\/p>\n
THE TRUMPET FEAST (ROSH HASHANAH)<\/p>\n
188Next comes the opening of the sacred month, when it is customary to sound the trumpet in the temple at the same time that the sacrifices are brought there, and its name of \u201ctrumpet feast\u201d is derived from this. It has a twofold significance, partly to the nation in particular, partly to all mankind in general. In the former sense it is a reminder of a mighty and marvelous event which came to pass when the oracles of the law were given from above. 189For then the sound of the trumpet pealed from heaven and reached, we may suppose, the ends of the universe, so that the event might strike terror even into those who were far from the spot and dwelling well nigh at the extremities of the earth, who would come to the natural conclusion that such mighty signs portended mighty consequences. And indeed what could men receive mightier or more profitable than the general laws which came from the mouth of God, not like the particular laws, through an interpreter?
\n190This is a significance peculiar to the nation. What follows is common to all mankind. The trumpet is the instrument used in war, both to sound the advance against the enemy when the moment comes for engaging battle and also for recalling the troops when they have to separate and return to their respective camps. And there is another war not of human agency when nature is at strife in herself, when her parts make onslaught one on another and her law-abiding sense of equality is vanquished by the greed for inequality.191Both these wars work destruction on the face of the earth. The enemy cuts down the fruit trees, ravage the country, set fire to the foodstuffs and the ripening ears of corn in the open fields, while the forces of nature use drought, rainstorms, violent moisture-laden winds, scorching sun rays, intense cold accompanied by snow, with the regular harmonious alternations of the yearly seasons turned into disharmony, a state of things in my opinion due to the impiety which does not gain a gradual hold but comes rushing with the force of a torrent among those whom these things befall. 192And therefore the law instituted this feast figured by that instrument of war the trumpet, which gives it its name, to be as a thank offering to God the peacemaker and peacekeeper, Who destroys faction both in cities and in the various parts of the universe and creates plenty and fertility and abundance of other good things and leaves the havoc of fruits without a single spark to be rekindled.<\/p>\n
THE FAST\/THE DAY OF ATONEMENT<\/p>\n
193The next feast held after the \u201cTrumpets\u201d is the Fast. Perhaps some of the perversely minded who are not ashamed to censure things excellent will say, What sort of a feast is this in which there are no gatherings to eat and drink, no company of entertainers or entertained, no copious supply of strong drink nor tables sumptuously furnished, nor a generous display of all the accompaniments of a public banquet, nor again the merriment and revelry with frolic and drollery, nor dancing to the sound of flute and harp and timbrels and cymbals, and the other instruments of the debilitated and invertebrate kind of music which through the channel of the ears awaken the unruly lusts? 194For it is in these and through these that men, in their ignorance of what true merriment is, consider that the merriment of a feast is to be found. This the clear-seeing eyes of Moses the ever wise discerned and therefore he called the fast a feast, the greatest of the feasts, in his native tongue a Sabbath of Sabbaths, or as the Greeks would say, a seven of sevens, a holier than the holy.
\n195He gave it this name for many reasons. First, because of the self-restraint which it entails; always and everywhere indeed he exhorted them to show this in all the affairs of life, in controlling the tongue and the belly and the organs below the belly, but on this occasion especially he bids them do honor to it by dedicating thereto a particular day. To one who has learnt to disregard food and drink which are absolutely necessary, are there any among the superfluities of life which he can fail to despise, things which exist to promote not so much preservation and permanence of life as pleasure with all its powers of mischief?
\n196Secondly, because the holy day is entirely devoted to prayers and supplications, and men from morn to eve employ their leisure in nothing else but offering petitions of humble entreaty in which they seek earnestly to propitiate God and ask for remission of their sins, voluntary and involuntary, and entertain bright hopes looking not to their own merits but to the gracious nature of Him Who sets pardon before chastisement.
\n197Thirdly, because of the time at which the celebration of the fast occurs, namely, that when all the annual fruits of the earth have been gathered in. To eat and drink of these without delay would, he held, show gluttony, but to fast and refrain from taking them as food shows the perfect piety which teaches the mind not to put trust in what stands ready prepared before us as though it were the source of health and life. For often its presence proves injurious and its absence beneficial. 198Those who abstain from food and drink after the ingathering of the fruits cry aloud to us with their souls, and though their voices utter no sound, their language could hardly be plainer. They say, \u201cWe have gladly received and are storing the boons of nature, yet we do not ascribe our preservation to any corruptible thing, but to God the Parent and Father and Saviour of the world and all that is therein, Who has the power and the right to nourish and sustain us by means of these or without these. 199See, for example, how the many thousands of our forefathers as they traversed the trackless and all-barren desert, were for forty years, the life of a generation, nourished by Him as in a land of richest and most fertile soil; how He opened fountains unknown before to give them abundance of drink for their use; how He rained food from heaven, neither more nor less than what sufficed for each day, that they might consume what they needed without hoarding, nor barter for the prospect of soulless stores their hopes of His goodness, but taking little thought of the bounties received rather reverence and worship the bountiful Giver and honor Him with the hymns and benedictions that are His due.\u201d
\n200By order of the law the fast is held on the tenth day. Why on the tenth? As has been shown in our detailed discussion of that number, it is called by the learned the all-perfect, and embraces all the progressions, arithmetical, harmonic and geometrical, and further the harmonies, the fourth, the fifth, the octave and the double octave, representing respectively the ratios 4:3, 3:2, 2:1 and 4:1, and it also contains the ratio of 9:8, so that it sums up fully and perfectly the leading truths of musical science, and for this reason it has received its name of the all-perfect. 201In ordaining that this privation of food and drink should be based on the full and perfect number 10, he intended to prescribe the best possible form of nourishment for the best part of us. He did not wish anyone to suppose that as their instructor in the mysteries he was advocating starvation, the most intolerable of sufferings, but only a brief stoppage in the influx which passes into the receptacles of the body. 202For this would ensure that the stream from the fountain of reason should flow pure and crystal-clear with smooth course into the soul, because the constantly repeated administrations of food which submerge the body sweep the reason away as well, whereas if they are checked, that same reason stoutly fortified can in pursuit of all that is worth seeing and hearing make its way without stumbling as upon a dry firm causeway. 203Besides, it was meet and right when everything has shown abundance as they would have it, and they enjoy a full and perfect measure of goodness, that amid this prosperity and lavish supply of boons, they should by abstaining from food and drink remind themselves of what it is to want, and offer prayers and supplications, on the one hand to ask that they may never really experience the lack of necessities, on the other to express their thankfulness because in such wealth of blessings they remember the ills they have been spared. Enough on this matter.<\/p>\n
TABERNACLES (SUKKOT)<\/p>\n
204The last of the annual feasts, called Tabernacles, recurs at the autumn equinox. From this we may draw two morals. The first is, that we should honor equality and hate inequality, for the former is the source and fountain of justice, the latter of injustice. The former is akin to open sunlight, the latter to darkness. The second moral is, that after all the fruits are made perfect, it is our duty to thank God Who brought them to perfection and is the source of all good things. 205For autumn, or after-fruitage, is, as also the name clearly implies, the season after the ripe fruit has been gathered in, when the sown crops and the fruit trees have paid their annual toll and bounden tribute, and the land has richly provided all that it yields for the sustenance of the various kinds of animals without number, both tame and wild, sustenance not only to be enjoyed on the spot and for the moment, but also in the future, through the foresight of nature, the friend of all that lives. 206Further, the people are commanded, during the time of the feast, to dwell in tents. The reason of this may be that the labor of the husbandmen no longer requires that they should live in the open air, as nothing is now left unprotected but all the fruits are stored in silos or similar places to escape the damage which often ensues through the blazing sunshine or storms of rain.207For when the crops which feed us are standing in the open field, you can only watch and guard the food so necessary to you, by coming out and not shutting yourself up like a woman who never stirs outside her quarters. And if, while you remain in the open air you encounter extreme cold or heat, you have the thick growth of the trees waiting to shade you, and sheltered under them you can easily escape injury from either source. But when all the fruits are being gathered in, come in yourself also to seek a more weatherproof mode of life and hope for rest in place of the toils which you endured when laboring on the land.
\nAnother reason may be that it should remind us of the long journeyings of our forefathers in the depths of the desert, when at every halting-place they spent many a year in tents. 208And indeed it is well in wealth, to remember your poverty, in distinction your insignificance, in high offices your position as a commoner, in peace your dangers in war, on land the storms on sea, in cities the life of loneliness. For there is no pleasure greater than in high prosperity to call to mind old misfortunes. 209But besides giving pleasure, it is a considerable help in the practice of virtue. For people who having had both good and ill before their eyes have rejected the ill and are enjoying the good, necessarily fall into a grateful frame of mind and are urged to piety by the fear of a change to the reverse, and also therefore in thankfulness for their present blessings they honor God with odes and words of praise and beseech Him and propitiate Him with supplications that they may never repeat the experience of such evils.
\n210Again, the beginning of this feast comes on the fifteenth day of the month for the same reason as was given when we were speaking of the season of spring, namely that the glorious light which nature gives should fill the universe not only by day but also by night, because on that day the sun and moon rise in succession to each other with no interval between their shining, which is not divided by any borderland of darkness. 211As a crown to the seven days he adds an eighth, which he calls the \u201cclosing,\u201d not meaning apparently that it is the closing of that feast only, but also of the yearly feasts which I have enumerated and described. For it is the last in the year and forms its conclusion.
\n212Perhaps also the number eight, the first cubic number, was assigned to the feast for the following reason: it is the beginning of the higher category of solids, marking where we pass from the unsubstantial and bring to its conclusion the category of the conceptual which rises to the solid in the scale of ascending powers.213And indeed the autumn festival, being as I have said a sort of complement and conclusion of all the feasts in the year, seems to have more stability and fixity, because the people have now received their returns from the land and are no longer perplexed and terrified by doubts as to its fertility or barrenness. For the anxious thoughts of the husbandman are never settled till the crops are gathered in, so numberless are the men and animals from whom they are liable to suffer harm.
\n214All this long exposition is due to my regard for the sacred seventh day, and my wish to show that all the yearly feasts prove to be as it were the children of that number which stands as a mother \u2026<\/p>\n
THE BASKET CEREMONY<\/p>\n
215But besides these we have what is not a feast, but is a general ceremony of a festal character called the Basket, a name which describes what takes place, as we shall shortly show. That it has not the prestige and standing of a feast is clear for many reasons. For it does not affect the nation as a united whole like each of the others, nor do we find any victim being brought or led to the altar and then sacrificed and given over to be consumed by the sacred and unquenchable fire, nor is there any specified number of days during which the feast is to last.
\n216But that it has a festal character and nearly approaches the form of a general ceremony can be easily seen. For every person who possesses farms or landed estates takes some of every kind of fruit and fills receptacles which, as I have said, are called baskets, and brings them with joy as a sample offering of his rich fruit harvest, to the temple, and there standing opposite the altar, gives them to the priest. Meanwhile he recites this beautiful and admirable canticle, or if he does not remember it, he listens with all attention while the priest repeats it. 217The sense of this canticle is as follows: \u201cThe founders of our race abandoned Syria and migrated to Egypt and, though few in number, increased to a populous nation. Their descendants suffered wrongs without number from the inhabitants, and when no further assistance from men appeared forthcoming, became suppliants of God and sought refuge in His help. 218He Who is kindly to all the wronged accepted their supplication and confounded their assailants with signs and wonders and portents and all the other marvels that were wrought at that time, and saved the victims of outrage who were suffering all that malice could devise, and not only brought them forth into freedom, but gave them a land fertile in every way. 219Of the fruits of this land we present a sample offering to Thee, our Benefactor, if indeed we may speak of presenting that which we receive. For all these things, good Master, are Thy boons and gifts, and as Thou hast judged us worthy of them, we take pride and delight in the unexpected blessings which Thou hast given us beyond all our hopes.\u201d
\n220This canticle is used continually by a succession of worshipers from early summer to late autumn, through the two seasons which constitute a complete half of the year. For the whole population cannot in a body bring the fruits of the season at a fixed time, but must do so at different times, and this may even be the case with the same persons coming from the same places. 221For since some of the fruits ripen more quickly than others, both because of the difference of the situation which may be warmer or colder, and for a multitude of other reasons, naturally the time when the firstfruits are due cannot be exactly defined or limited, but extends over a very considerable period. 222These offerings are assigned for the use of the priests, because they have no territory allotted to them, nor property which brings them income, and their heritage consists of the offerings of the nation in return for the religious duties imposed upon them by night and day.
\n223I have now completed the discussion of the number seven and of matters connected with days and months and years that have reference to that number, and also of the feasts which are associated with it. In this I have followed the order of the principal heads set before us as the sequence of the subjects demanded. I now proceed to the next head, in which we find recorded a statement of the honor due to parents.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 3<\/p>\n
On the particular laws which come under two of the ten general commandments, namely the sixth against adulterers and all licentiousness and the seventh against murderers and all violence.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 3.1\u20136<\/p>\n
LAMENTATION OVER POLITICAL CARES<\/p>\n
1There was a time when I had leisure for philosophy and for the contemplation of the universe and its contents, when I made its spirit my own in all its beauty and loveliness and true blessedness, when my constant companions were divine themes and verities, wherein I rejoiced with a joy that never cloyed or sated. I had no base or abject thoughts nor groveled in search of reputation or of wealth or bodily comforts, but seemed always to be borne aloft into the heights with a soul possessed by some God-sent inspiration, a fellow-traveler with the sun and moon and the whole heaven and universe. 2Ah then I gazed down from the upper air, and straining the mind\u2019s eye beheld, as from some commanding peak, the multitudinous worldwide spectacles of earthly things, and blessed my lot in that I had escaped by main force from the plagues of mortal life. 3But, as it proved, my steps were dogged by the deadliest of mischiefs, the hater of the good, envy, which suddenly set upon me and ceased not to pull me down with violence till it had plunged me in the ocean of civil cares, in which I am swept away, unable even to raise my head above the water.4Yet amid my groans I hold my own, for, planted in my soul from my earliest days I keep the yearning for culture which ever has pity and compassion for me, lifts me up and relieves my pain. To this I owe it that sometimes I raise my head and with the soul\u2019s eyes\u2014dimly indeed because the mist of extraneous affairs has clouded their clear vision\u2014I yet make shift to look around me in my desire to inhale a breath of life pure and unmixed with evil. 5And if unexpectedly I obtain a spell of fine weather and a calm from civil turmoil, I get me wings and ride the waves and almost tread the lower air, wafted by the breezes of knowledge, which often urges me to come to spend my days with her, a truant as it were from merciless masters in the shape not only of men but of affairs, which pour in upon me like a torrent from different sides. 6Yet it is well for me to give thanks to God even for this, that though submerged, I am not sucked down into the depths; but can also open the soul\u2019s eyes, which in my despair of comforting hope I thought had now lost their sight, and am irradiated by the light of wisdom, and am not given over to lifelong darkness. So behold me daring, not only to read the sacred interpretations of the Torah but also in my love of knowledge to peer into each of them and unfold and reveal what is not known to the multitude.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 3.7\u201311<\/p>\n
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT: ADULTERY<\/p>\n
7Since out of the ten oracles which God gave forth Himself without a spokesman or interpreter, we have spoken of five, namely those graven on the first table, and also of the particular laws which had reference to these, our present duty to couple with them those of the second table as well as we can. I will again endeavor to fit the special laws into each of the heads. 8The first commandment in the second table is \u201cThou shalt not commit adultery.\u201d It comes first, I think, because pleasure is a mighty force felt throughout the whole inhabited world, no part of which has escaped its domination, neither the denizens of land nor of sea nor of the air. For in all three elements, beasts, fowls and fishes all alike treat her with profound respect and deference and submit to her orders, look to her every glance or nod, accept contentedly even the caprices of her arrogance and almost anticipate her commands, so promptly and instantaneously do they hasten to render their services. 9Now, even natural pleasure is often greatly to blame when the craving for it is immoderate and insatiable, as for instance when it takes the form of voracious gluttony, even though none of the food taken is of the forbidden kind, or again, the passionate desire for women shown by those who in their craze for sexual intercourse behave unchastely, not with the wives of others, but with their own. 10But the blame in most of these cases rests less with the soul than with the body, which contains a great amount both of fire and of moisture; the fire as it consumes the material set before it quickly demands a second supply; the moisture is sluiced in a stream through the genital organs, and creates in them irritations, itchings and titillations without ceasing.
\n11It is not so with men who are mad to possess the wives of others, sometimes those of their relations and friends, who live to work havoc among their neighbors, who go about to bastardize wholesale, widespread family connections, to turn their prayers for married happiness into a curse and render their hopes of offspring fruitless. Here it is the soul which is incurably diseased. Such persons must be punished with death as the common enemies of the whole human race, that they may not live to ruin more houses with immunity and be the tutors of others who make it their business to emulate the wickedness of their ways.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 3.12\u201331<\/p>\n
FORBIDDEN PARTNERS<\/p>\n
12Excellent also are the other injunctions laid down by the law on the relation of the sexes. It commands abstinence not only from the wives of others but also from widows, in cases where the union is forbidden by the moral law. 13To the Persian custom, it at once shows its aversion and abhorrence and forbids it as gross sacrilege. For the Persian magnates marry their mothers and regard the children of the marriage as nobles of the highest birth, worthy, so it is said, to hold the supreme sovereignty. 14What form of unholiness could be more impious than this: that a father\u2019s bed, which should be kept untouched as something sacred, should be brought to shame: that no respect should be shown for a mother\u2019s ageing years: that the same man should be son and husband to the same woman and again the same woman wife and mother to the same man: that the children of both should be brothers to their father and grandsons to their mother; that she should be both mother and grandmother of those whom she bore and he both father and half-brother of those whom he begot?
\n15Even, among the Greeks these things were done in old days in Thebes in the case of Oedipus the son of Laius. They were done in ignorance, not by deliberate intention, and yet the marriage produced such a harvest of ills that nothing was wanting that could lead to the utmost misery. 16For a succession of wars civil and foreign was left to be passed on as a heritage to children and descendants from their fathers and ancestors. The greatest cities in Greece were sacked, and armed forces both of natives and allied contingents were destroyed: the bravest leaders on both sides fell one after the other; brothers slew brothers in the deadly feud engendered by ambition for sovereign power. In consequence, not only families and independent territories, but also the largest part of the Greek world perished, involved in the general destruction. For cities formerly well populated were left stripped of their inhabitants as monuments of the disasters of Greece, a sinister sight to contemplate \u2026 19All these things appear to me to be the result of the ill-matched matings of sons with mothers. For justice who watches over human affairs avenges the unholy deeds on the impious, and the impiety extends beyond the perpetrators of the deed to those who voluntarily range themselves with the perpetrators.
\n20But such careful precautions has our law taken in these matters that it has not even permitted the son of a first marriage to marry his stepmother after the death of his father, both on account of the honor due to his father and because the names of mother and stepmother are closely akin, however different are the feelings called up by the two words. 21For he who has been taught to abstain from another\u2019s wife because she is called his stepmother, will a fortiori abstain from taking his natural mother \u2026 for it would be the height of folly while acknowledging the claims of a half parentage to appear to treat with contempt the full and complete whole.
\n22Next comes a prohibition against espousing a sister, a very excellent rule tending to promote both continence and outward decency. Now Solon the lawgiver of the Athenians permitted marriage with half-sisters on the father\u2019s side but prohibited it when the mother was the same. The lawgiver of the Lacedaemonians, on the other hand, allowed the second but forbade the first. 23But the lawgiver of the Egyptians poured scorn upon the cautiousness of both, and, holding that, the course which they enjoined stopped half-way, produced a fine crop of lewdness. With a lavish hand he bestowed on bodies and souls the poisonous bane of incontinence and gave full liberty to marry sisters of every degree whether they belonged to one of their brother\u2019s parents or to both \u2026 24These practices our most holy Moses rejected with abhorrence as alien and hostile to a commonwealth free from reproach and as encouragements and incitements to the vilest of customs. He stoutly forbade the union of a brother with a sister whether both her parents were the same as his or only one. 25 \u2026 Why hamper the fellow-feeling and intercommunion of mankind by compressing within the narrow space of each separate house the great and goodly plant which might extend and spread itself over continents and islands and the whole inhabited world? For intermarriages with outsiders create new kinships not a wit inferior to blood relationships.
\n26On this principle he prohibits many other unions, not allowing marriage with a son\u2019s daughter or a daughter\u2019s daughter, nor with an aunt whether paternal or maternal, nor with one who has been wife to an uncle or son or brother, nor again with a stepdaughter whether widow or unmarried, I need not say while the wife is alive, heaven forbid, but even after her death. For the stepfather is virtually a father whose duty is to set his wife\u2019s daughter in the same position as his own. 27Again, he does not allow the same man to marry two sisters either at the same or at different times, even if the person in question has repudiated the one he married first. For while she is still alive \u2026 he considered that the law of holiness required that the sister should not take the position which the wife has lost by her misfortune, but should learn not to set at nought the rights of kinship; nor use as a stepping-stone the fallen state of one so closely united to her by birth, nor bask at ease while enjoying and returning the caresses of her sister\u2019s enemies \u2026<\/p>\n
PROSCRIPTION OF INTERMARRIAGE<\/p>\n
29But also, he says, do not enter into the partnership of marriage with a member of a foreign nation, lest some day conquered by the forces of opposing customs you surrender and stray unawares from the path that leads to piety and turn aside into a pathless wild. And though perhaps you yourself will hold your ground steadied from your earliest years by the admirable instructions instilled into you by your parents, with the holy laws always as their key-note, there is much to be feared for your sons and daughters. It may well be that they, enticed by spurious customs which they prefer to the genuine, are likely to unlearn the honor due to the one God, and that is the first and the last stage of supreme misery \u2026<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 3.32\u201336<\/p>\n
THE LAWS OF FAMILY PURITY<\/p>\n
32Whenever the menstrual issue occurs, a man must not touch a woman, but must during that period refrain from intercourse and respect the law of nature. He must also remember the lesson that the generative seeds should not be wasted fruitlessly for the sake of a gross and untimely pleasure. For it is just as if a husbandman should in intoxication or lunacy sow wheat and barley in ponds or mountain-streams instead of in the plains, since the fields should become dry before the seed is laid in them. 33Now nature also each month purges the womb as if it were a cornfield\u2014a field with mysterious properties, over which, like a good husbandman, he must watch for the right time to arrive. So while the field is still inundated he will keep back the seed, which otherwise will be silently swept away by the stream, as the humidity not only relaxes, but utterly paralyses the seminal nerve-forces, which in nature\u2019s laboratory, the womb, mold the living creature and with consummate craftsmanship perfect each part both of body and soul. But if the menstruation ceases, he may boldly sow the generative seeds, no longer fearing that what he lays will perish.<\/p>\n
MATRIMONY WITH A STERILE WOMAN<\/p>\n
34They too must be branded with reproach, who plough the hard and stony land. And who should they be but those who mate with barren women? For in the quest of mere licentious pleasure like the most lecherous of men, they destroy the procreative germs with deliberate purpose. For what other motive can they have in plighting themselves to such women? It cannot be the hope of offspring, a hope which they know must necessarily fail to be realized; it can only be an inordinate frenzy, and incontinence past all cure. 35Those who marry maidens in ignorance, at the time, of their capacity or incapacity for successful motherhood, and later refuse to dismiss them, when prolonged childlessness shows them to be barren, deserve our pardon. Familiarity, that most constraining influence, is too strong for them, and they are unable to rid themselves of the charm of old affection imprinted on their souls by long companionship. 36But those who sue for marriage with women whose sterility has already been proved with other husbands, do but copulate like pigs or goats, and their names should be inscribed in the lists of the impious as adversaries of God. For while God in His love both for mankind and all that lives, spares no care to effect the preservation and permanence of every race, those persons who make an art of quenching the life of the seed as it drops, stand confessed as the enemies of nature.<\/p>\n
On the Special Laws 4.59\u201377<\/p>\n
LEGAL JUSTICE<\/p>\n
59The first instruction that the law gives to the judge is that he should not accept idle hearing. What is this? \u201cLet your ears, my friend\u201d he says, \u201cbe purged\u201d and purged they will be if streams of worthy thoughts and words are constantly poured into them and if they refuse to admit the long-winded expositions, the idle hackneyed absurdities of the makers of myths and farces and of vain inventions with their glorification of the worthless. 60And the phrase \u201cnot accept idle hearing\u201d has another signification consistent with that just mentioned. If men listen to hearsay given as evidence, their listening will be idle and unsound. Why so? Because the eyes are conversant with the actual events; they are in a sense in contact with the facts and grasp them in their completeness through the cooperation of the light which reveals and tests everything. But ears, as one of the ancients has aptly said, are less trustworthy than eyes; they are not conversant with facts, but are distracted by words which interpret the facts but are not necessarily always veracious. 61And therefore it seems that some Grecian legislators did well when they copied from the most sacred tables of Moses the enactment that hearing is not accepted as evidence, meaning that what a man has seen is to be judged trustworthy, but what he has heard is not entirely reliable.
\n62The second instruction to the judge is not to take gifts, for gifts, says the law, blind the eyes which see and corrupt the things that are just, while they prevent the mind from pursuing its course straight along the high road. 63And while receiving bribes to do injustice is the act of the utterly depraved, to receive them to do justice shows a half depravity. For there are some magistrates half way in wickedness, mixtures of justice and injustice, who having been appointed to the duty of supporting the wronged against the wrongdoers think themselves justified in refusing without a consideration to record a victory to the necessarily victorious party and so make their verdict a thing purchased and paid for. 64Then when they are attacked they plead that they did not pervert justice, since those who ought to lose did lose and those who deserved to win were successful. This is a bad defense, for two things are demanded from the good judge, a verdict absolutely according to law and a refusal to be bribed. But the awarder of justice who has taken gifts for it has unconsciously disfigured what nature has made beautiful. 65Apart from this he offends in two other ways; he is habituating himself to be covetous of money, and vice is the source from which the greatest iniquities spring, and he is injuring one who deserves to be benefited when that person has to pay a price for justice. 66And therefore Moses gives us a very instructive command, when he bids us \u201cpursue justice justly,\u201d implying that it is possible to do so unjustly. He refers to those who give a just award for lucre, not only in law courts but everywhere on land and sea and one may almost say in all the affairs of life. 67Thus we have heard of a person accepting a deposit of little value and repaying it with a view to ensnare rather than to benefit the person to whom he gives it. His object was by baiting his hook with trustworthiness in small matters to secure trustfulness in greater things, and this is nothing else than executing justice unjustly, for while repayment of what is due to others is a just deed, it was not done justly being done in pursuit of further gains.
\n68Now the principal cause of such misdeeds is familiarity with falsehood which grows up with the children right from their birth and from the cradle, the work of nurses and mothers and the rest of the company, slaves and free, who belong to the household. By word and deed they are perpetually welding and uniting falsehood to the soul as though it were a necessary part inherent in its nature, though if nature had really made it congenital it ought to have been eradicated by habituation to things excellent.<\/p>\n
THE URIM AND THUMIM<\/p>\n
69And what has life to show so excellent as truth, which the man of perfect wisdom set as a monument on the robe of the high priest in the most sacred place where the dominant part of the soul resides, when he wished to deck him with a sacred ornament of special beauty and magnificence? And beside truth he set a kindred quality which he called \u201cclear showing,\u201d the two representing both aspects of the reason we possess, the inward and the outward. For the outward requires \u201cclear showing,\u201d by which the invisible thoughts in each of us are made known to our neighbors. The inward requires \u201ctruth\u201d to bring to perfection the conduct of life and the actions by which the way to happiness is discovered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the Migration of Abraham Peder Borgen In On the Migration of Abraham 86\u201393 (henceforth Migration) Philo interprets the words to Abraham in Gen 12:2, \u201cI will make your name great.\u201d When setting forth his subject matter in Migration 86\u201388, Philo concludes: \u201cAnd this fair fame is won as a rule by all who cheerfully … <\/p>\n