{
    "title": "Who is the Heir of Divine Things",
    "language": "en",
    "versionTitle": "merged",
    "versionSource": "https://www.sefaria.org/Who_is_the_Heir_of_Divine_Things",
    "text": {
        "Introduction": [
            "WHO IS THE HEIR OF DIVINE THINGS (QUIS RERUM DIVINARUM HERES) <br>ANALYTICAL INTRODUCTION",
            "This treatise, the longest of the whole series and containing many fine passages, is a straightforward commentary with comparatively few digressions on Gen. 15:2–18.",
            "2. And Abram says, Master, what wilt Thou give me? I depart childless. But the son of Masek, the woman born in my household, is this Damascus Eliezer.",
            "3. And Abram said, Since Thou hast given me no seed, the son of my household shall be my heir.",
            "4. And immediately the voice of the Lord came to him, saying, He shall not be thy heir, but he who shall come forth from thee, he shall be thy heir.",
            "5. And He led him forth outside and said to him, Look up indeed into heaven, and count the stars if thou shalt be able to number them, and He said, So shall be thy seed.",
            "6. And Abram believed on God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.",
            "7. And He said to him, I am the God who brought thee from the land of the Chaldeans to give thee this land to inherit.",
            "8. And he said, Master, by what shall I know that I shall inherit it?",
            "9. And He said to him, Take Me a heifer of three years old, and a goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove and a pigeon.",
            "10. And he took for Him all these, and divided them in the middle, and placed them facing each other; but the birds he did not divide.",
            "11. And the birds came down to the bodies their half pieces, and Abram sat with them.",
            "12. And about sunset a trance (ecstasy) fell upon Abram, and lo, a great dark terror falls upon him.",
            "13. And it was said to Abram, Knowing thou shalt know that thy seed shall be a sojourner in a land not their own, and they shall enslave them and ill-treat them and humble them four hundred years.",
            "14. And the nation which they shall be slaves to I will judge, and after this they shall come forth hither with much substance (stock).",
            "15. But thou shalt depart to thy fathers in peace, nourished in a good old age (or, as Philo, “nourished with peace”).",
            "16. And in the fourth generation they shall turn away hither, for the iniquities of the Amorites are not yet fulfilled until now.",
            "17. And when the sun was at its setting, a flame arose, and lo, a furnace (oven) smoking, and torches of fire, which went in the midst of these half pieces.",
            "18. In that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying, To thy seed will I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates.",
            "The first point to which Philo calls attention is Abraham’s boldness of speech, the proper attitude of the faithful servant (1–9). Silence indeed is more fitting in the ignorant, as is expressed in the text, “Be silent and listen” (10), and we should remember that this includes the silence of the soul, which is the opposite of that wandering mind, which so often accompanies mere silence of speech (11–13). But that the wise have a right to boldness of speech is shewn emphatically in the story of Moses, and here Philo quotes several of his pathetic appeals to God and concludes that such appeals are the mark of the “friend of God” (14–21). Yet in Abraham’s words there is a sense of pious awe or caution (εὐλάβεια) as well as boldness. Philo notes the term “Master” connoting a greater degree of fear than “Lord,” and thence passes on into an impassioned meditation expressing the combination of awe and gratitude, which the words “Master what wilt thou give me?” (which he takes in the sense of “what more canst thou give, who hast given all?”) call up in the mind of the devout worshipper (15–22). And in the same way he treats the verse, “Shall I depart childless?” Shall I, that is, be denied the spiritual offspring of higher thought? Shall I have no heir but the son of Masek (34–39).",
            "Thus we are necessarily led to the interpretation of Masek the “homeborn” and her son. The name means “from a kiss” and kiss (φίλημα) differs from love (φιλεῖν) as marking a lower and less genuine kind of affection (40–41). Thus it may stand for the life of sense, which the wise will regard as a servant, but not love (42). Philo then gives two examples where “kiss” (καταφιλεῖν) signifies the kiss of insincerity, while φιλεῖν shews true affection, and then introduces somewhat inappropriately his favourite parable of the Hated and the Beloved Wife (Deut. 21:15–17), the latter of whom he identifies with Masek (45–49) and touches on the analogy between the two wives and Leah and Rachel (50). Masek’s son Damascus represents all of us who honour Sense. The name means “Blood of sackcloth” and thus symbolizes the animal or “blood”-life as opposed to the life of mind and reason (52–57). Damascus is also called Eliezer (God is my help) which signifies the inability of the blood-life to maintain itself without God’s help. And again his inferiority is marked by the absence of any named father (58–62).",
            "Abraham’s question then means “can this blood-life be the heir of higher things?” and the profound inward conviction symbolized by the voice of God answers—No, not that, but he that shall come out of thee shall be thy heir (63–68). These words Philo audaciously understands to mean that the “heir” must come out of, or leave, that is surrender and dedicate to God, not only body, sense and speech, but his whole self (69–74). What the inheritance is is shewn by the next words, “He led him forth outside and said, ‘Look (or ‘See’) up into heaven,’ ” for heaven is another name for the treasure-house of divine blessings, as it is called in Deuteronomy (75–76), and to be able to “see” up to this is the privilege of the true Israel which does not like its unworthy representatives in the wilderness refuse to “look to the Manna,” preferring the onions and fishes of Egypt (76–80). As for the phrase “He led him up out outside,” there is no tautology, for since we may well be called both outside and inside, if our inward feelings are not in accord with our outward actions, so the phrase shews that the Abraham-mind is altogether outside, outside that is of the trammels of sense, speech and body and above all of SELF (81–85).",
            "The next words “count the stars” do not refer to mere number, as is shewn by “so (not “so many”) shall be thy seed,” but to the “star-like” nature of the soul-children, and the stars themselves are not those which we see, but the vastly greater glories of the Ideal Universe, of which these are but the copies (86–89).",
            "The next verse raises the question why Abraham’s believing God should be counted to him for righteousness. How can anyone disbelieve God? Philo replies that while in itself there is nothing marvellous in this belief, yet in view of the proneness of human nature to trust in lower things, it may well be described as a “just” or “righteous” action (90–95).",
            "In verse 7, the words “I am the God who brought thee from the land of the Chaldeans to give thee this land to inherit,” send our thoughts to a fulfilled boon, as well as that which is to come. God had brought the soul out of the land of star-lore, where heaven itself is God, and has led him to the land of “wisdom,” that is of acknowledging the Creator instead of the creature (96–99).",
            "Abraham’s question in verse 8 “How shall I know?” does not imply doubt of the promise, but only the natural desire to know how it will come about, and the immediate answer of God shews that the question is accepted as right (100–102). In the answer (verse 9), we first note the words “take for me,” which indicate first that all we have we do but receive (103), and secondly that we should receive or “take” them for God and not for ourselves. Philo develops this theme in his familiar manner in application to our senses, mind and all other gifts (104–111). An illustration of this from the phrase <i>My</i> first-fruits or “beginnings” leads to some thoughts on the divine origin of the fruits of the earth, as well as of human parentage (112–119). And again if the beginnings are God’s so also are the ends (120–121), and finally we have to remember that God deigns to “take” from us, as He shewed, when He took the Levites as a ransom for the others (123–124).",
            "Proceeding with the same verse, the heifer signifies the soul, the ram speech, and the goat sense-perception. They are all “three years old,” the perfect number signifying beginning, middle and end, while the solitary turtle-dove and the sociable pigeon are respectively divine and human wisdom. The first three are divided, soul into reasoning and unreasoning, speech into true and false, sense-perception into real and illusory, while the two “wisdoms” are incapable of division (125–132). This work of division is one of the functions of the creative Logos and is illustrated from various aspects of creation (133–140). But we must note also that the three creatures divided in the story are divided in the middle, that is equally, and this brings us to the disquisition “about the division into equals and opposites,” which supplies the second half of the traditional title of the treatise and occupies the next sixty-five sections.",
            "Equality which in actual practice cannot be obtained exactly and is therefore an attribute of the divine Division by the Logos (141–143) may be equality in number or magnitude or capacity, and again it may be numerical or proportional (144–145). Philo illustrates all these at somewhat wearisome length. He first gives a catalogue of natural phenomena where we find the numerical balance (146–151), and then examples of proportional equality, concluding with the thought of man as the Microcosm and the Cosmos (152–155), and this leads him on to shew how God deals with small and great on the same principle (156–160). Moses too shews his reverence for equality partly by his praises of justice, the very essence of which is equality, and also in the examples of it scattered throughout the Law. Such are the divisions of day and night, of man and woman, and others mentioned in the early chapters of Genesis (161–165), and in the body of the Law itself, the Divine Presence dividing the Cherubim, that is the two Potencies, on the ark, and the division of the Ten Commandments into two tables of five each (166–169), which gives occasion for stating shortly the meaning of each commandment (169–173). Other examples are the permanent sacrifices (174), the two sets of the shewbread (175), the two jewels on the High Priest’s robe (176), the two mountains of blessing and cursing, and the two goats of Lev. 16 with a short digression on the meaning of the rite (177–181). Two other examples which follow give occasion for longer mystical meditation. The blood which was poured partly on the altar and partly into the mixing-bowls shews how divine wisdom, that is mind in its pure form, is an offering to God, and human wisdom, set by God in the mixing-bowls of the senses, may be purified by the cleansing blood (182–185). So too the offering of the half-shekel indicates the ransoming of the suppliant soul, while the un-offered half stands for the mind which is content with its slavery (186–190). Again we have examples of equal division in the Manna, where he that had much had not too much, and he that had little did not lack (191), and the Passover, where the lamb is to be distributed, so that each may have sufficient (192–193). And after two other briefly mentioned examples there follows a longer allegorical treatment of the ingredients of the incense-offering interpreted as the thanksgiving of the four elements and therefore of the World (191–200), and finally a fine passage in which citing the story of Aaron standing between the living and the dead, and the cloud which divided the host of Egypt from Israel, he describes the work of the Logos as mediating between the creature and the Creator, on the one hand proclaiming the divine mercy, on the other hand standing surety for the ultimate obedience of mankind—a passage which must surely have deeply impressed his Christian readers (201–206).",
            "The words “facing each other” suggest that these divisions are into opposites, and so we find this phenomenon of oppositeness running throughout creation. In a long catalogue which begins with such physical examples as hot and cold and ends with human qualities, Philo brings this out and finally points out in triumph that it is in vain for the Greeks to boast of this philosophy of opposites as due to Heracleitus, since Moses knew and shewed it long before (207–214).",
            "We might now pass on, but there is one example of division which Philo feels needs special attention. As in the story of Genesis three creatures were divided, there were six halves, and therefore the dividing Logos stands in the sacred position of seventh. We have a parallel to this in the great chandelier of the Tabernacle and Philo deals with this in considerable detail, shewing that its general structure is sevenfold, <i>i.e</i>. three of each kind on each side of the main stalk (215–220). He goes on to suggest that it represents the seven planets with the sun in the centre, as well as the three pairs of soul division mentioned above with the Logos as the seventh (221–225). And this gives him opportunity for two other remarks on the chandelier. He notes that while the incense-altar (as mentioned before) represents thanksgiving of the elements, and the table with its loaves thanksgiving of the creatures formed of these elements, the chandelier signifies the thanksgiving of the heavens (226). And so while we are told the dimensions of the first two we hear nothing of the dimensions of the chandelier, in accordance with the truth that heaven has no bounds of which the human mind has ken (227–229).",
            "“The birds he did not divide.” We have already had a brief explanation of this, but it needs filling out. While the unreasoning part of the soul has its seven divisions, the mind (the pigeon of the story) like the sphere of the fixed stars, which is its heavenly analogy, has no divisions, and so too the turtle-dove, the Logos, is indivisible: and yet both though undivided themselves are perpetually dividing and distinguishing everything that comes before them (230–236).",
            "“The birds came down to the bodies, the half pieces.” Here of course “birds” is used in a different sense, as is shewn by their “coming down,” for it is the nature of birds to fly up (237–238). Rather these birds are like the reptiles banned in Leviticus, and have left their natural home of heaven for earth. They are the numberless thoughts which beset the mind and drag it “down” and feast upon the bodily element in us (239–243). And when we read that “Abraham sat down with them” it signifies the wise man’s attitude to these thoughts. He is like the statesman who puts an end to foreign wars, that is to wicked thoughts which attack the soul, and to civil faction, that is to the contention of opposing doctrines (243–246). And here once again Philo catalogues the different theories of the schools on physical and theological problems, and pictures the Sage, who sits down with them, as half-midwife, half-judge, discarding the evil offspring of the soul and saving the good (246–248).",
            "And about sunset an “ecstasy” fell upon Abraham. Philo enumerates four meanings of this word—madness, astonishment, mental tranquillity (or vacancy) and prophetic inspiration (249). He proceeds to give examples of each (250–252), but two examples of the second, viz. that Isaac was in an “ecstasy,” <i>i.e</i>. astonished, when Jacob brought him the savoury meats, and Jacob was in an “ecstasy” <i>i.e</i>. astonished, that Joseph still lived and ruled over Egypt, cause him to break off strangely into the lessons which may be drawn from these two passages (252–256). When he resumes he gives an example of the third meaning, viz. the ecstasy (trance) “which fell upon Adam and he slept” (267), and proceeds to the fourth, which he holds to be the meaning of the word in our text. He shews that either in the sense of predicter or of spokesman Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and above all Moses are prophets (258–262). And the phrase “about sunset,” he thinks, well suits this meaning. For when the “sun” of the mind is in action, we cannot be god-possessed. It is when something higher takes possession of him and plays upon him like the musician on the chords that the prophet becomes the voice of God (263–266).",
            "We turn to the promises given to Abraham in verses 13–16. “Thy seed shall be a sojourner in a land not their own.” The soul-children must dwell a while in that “earth” which stands for bodily things (262–268). They will serve for four hundred years, and with Philo’s usual recklessness about numbers the four hundred years stand for the four passions (who are also the people whom they serve and whom God will judge), and what slavery to the passions means is described briefly (269–271). But when the redemption comes, we shall depart with much substance or stock, to be our supply for the journey. This supply is the fruits of education, beginning with the school learning, which creates the desire for the higher philosophy (272–274).",
            "“But thou shalt depart to thy fathers, nourished with peace, in a good old age.” First we note the contrast here implied between the peace of the Sage and the war and slavery described above (275). Secondly, that he “departs,” not “dies” (276). But who are the “fathers”? Not those whom he left behind in Chaldea, from whom God had called him away (277–279). Some think the heavenly bodies are meant, some the “ideas,” others again the four elements to which our bodies return. And Philo seems ready to accept this, if we add also the “fifth element,” to which the soul returns—at any rate he gives no other (279–283). When the promise adds nourished with peace,” it contrasts the wise man’s lot with the spiritual welfare of ordinary men. In that war our enemies may be the “external things” or the passions and vices within us. And then Philo repeats in a slightly different form the parable of the guards of the soul and body which he has already used in <i>De Ebr.</i> 201 and <i>De Conf.</i> 18 (284–286). That the peace cannot be literally meant is clear when we remember that Abraham’s life was beset by war, exile and even want (286–288). Yet all these, allegorically considered, are blessings—war against wrongdoing, exile from the false star-lore, want of passion (289). And the “good old age” must mean the life of wisdom, for a day well-spent is more than years of folly (290–292).",
            "“And in the fourth generation they shall return here.” The “fourth generation” is interpreted to mean the fourth of the seven-year periods of life. In the first the child knows nothing of good or evil. The second is the time when vice shews itself, partly owing to the natural disposition, partly to mishandled education. In the third comes the healing influence of philosophy, and thus in the fourth the man is in his strength ready to travel to the land of wisdom (293–299).",
            "“For the sins of the Amorites are not yet filled up.” Some read a fatalistic meaning into these words, but Moses is no fatalist (300–301). The name “Amorites” means “talkers” and here they are the deceivers who misuse the gift of speech. It is not till sophistry is convicted, and thus “filled,” that we can fly from the land of lies and seek the wisdom indicated by “here” (302–306).",
            "“When the sun was at its setting a flame arose and behold a smoking furnace.” The flame of virtue often appears late and at the close of life (307), and while we are still in the land of the Amorites it is like the smoke of a furnace. Smoke brings tears to the eyes and so when we see virtue in this obscured form, we weep for its perfected form (308–310). In another way this furnace or oven may be the type of the earnest soul, which contains and “cooks” the nourishment supplied by the virtues (311). As for “the torches of fire which went in the midst of the half-pieces,” they are the judgements of God, passing through and dividing all things (312).",
            "Finally we have the summing up. In that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham saying, “to thy seed will I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” Here then we have the wise man declared the heir. For we have already seen that the land is wisdom (313–315), and when he adds the words about the rivers we must note that Egypt is put first and Euphrates last. For the process of perfecting begins with Egypt, the body, and the bodily things which are necessary to our existence, and ends with the great river of God’s wisdom with all its joys and blessings (315–316).",
            "In this treatise we once more have, as in the <i>De Sacrificiis,</i> the help of the Papyrus discovered in Upper Egypt in 1889 and stated to be as early as, and probably earlier than, the 6th century, A very cursory examination of Wendland’s <i>Apparatus Criticus</i>, will shew how valuable is this addition to our textual authorities. Particularly interesting is the frequent note “Pap. (Mangey),” shewing how often the acumen of Mangey anticipated the discovery. But like all documents it is not infallible, and while in most cases I thoroughly endorse Wendland’s preference for the readings of the Papyrus against those of the MSS., there are a few in which I think he has been too subservient to it; and there are also many places in which though it supports the MSS. there is evidently or probably some corruption, on which conjecture may exercise its ingenuity."
        ],
        "": [
            [
                "<big>WHO IS THE HEIR OF DIVINE THINGS</big> <small>And On The Division Into Equals And Opposites</small> <br>[1] In the preceding treatise we have discussed as carefully as was possible the question of rewards. Now our task is to inquire who is the heir of divine things. When the Sage heard the oracular promise to this purport,",
                "[2] “Thy reward shall be exceeding great,” he answers with the question, “Master, what wilt thou give me? I go hence childless. The son of Masek, she who was born in my house, is this Damascus Eliezer.” And again he says “Since thou hast given me no seed, he that was born in my house shall be my heir” (Gen. 15:1–3).",
                "[3] Yet we should have expected that he (for who would not?) would have been struck mute and speechless in amazement at the majesty and greatness of the Giver of the oracle, if not for fear, at any rate for exceeding joy. For men are tongue-tied by overwhelming joy, as well as by violent grief.",
                "[4] This it is that led Moses to confess that he has become feeble of voice and slow of tongue, ever since God began to hold converse with him (Ex. 4:10). And the testimony of the prophet is true indeed. For at such times it is natural that the organ of speech should be held in check, while the language of the understanding becomes articulate and flows in resistless stream, as its wisdom pours forth beauty after beauty, not of words but of thoughts, with a power as easy as it is sublime.",
                "[5] Yet courage and well-timed frankness before our superiors are admirable virtues also, so that there seems to be more truth than comedy in the words of the comic poet,",
                "<small>The servant, trained to keep a quiet tongue <br>Whate’er befalls, is sure to prove a knave. <br>Grant to thy man some measure of free speech.</small>"
            ],
            [
                "[6] When, then, is it that the servant speaks frankly to his master? Surely it is when his heart tells him that he has not wronged his owner, but that his words and deeds are all for that owner’s benefit.",
                "[7] And so when else should the slave of God open his mouth freely to Him Who is the ruler and master both of himself and of the All, save when he is pure from sin and the judgements of his conscience are loyal to his master, when he feels more joy at being the servant of God than if he had been king of all the human race and assumed an uncontested sovereignty over land and sea alike?",
                "[8] The loyalty of Abraham’s service and ministry is shewn by the concluding words of the oracle addressed to Abraham’s son, “I will give to thee and thy seed all this land, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in thy seed, because Abraham thy father hearkened to My voice and kept My injunctions, My commands, My ordinances and My statutes” (Gen. 26:3–5).",
                "[9] It is the highest praise which can be given to a servant, that he neglects none of his master’s commands, that never hesitating in his labour of love he employs all and more than all his powers as he strives by sound judgement to bring all his business to a successful issue."
            ],
            [
                "[10] There are indeed some whom it befits to hear but not to speak, those to whom the words apply, “Be silent and hear” (Deut. 27:9). An excellent injunction! For ignorance is exceeding bold and glib of tongue; and the first remedy for it is to hold its peace, the second to give ear to those who advance something worth hearing.",
                "[11] Yet let no one suppose that this exhausts the significance of the words “be silent and hear.” No, they enjoin something else of greater weight. They bid us not only be silent with the tongue and hear with the ears, but be silent and hear with the soul also.",
                "[12] For many who come to hear a discourse have not come with their minds, but wander abroad rehearsing inwardly numberless thoughts on numberless subjects, thoughts on their families, on outsiders, on things private and things public, which properly should be forgotten for the moment. All these, we may say, form a series of successions in the mind, and the inward uproar makes it impossible for them to listen to the speaker, who discourses as in an audience not of human beings, but of lifeless statues who have ears, but no hearing is in those ears.",
                "[13] If then the mind determines to have no dealing with any of the matters which visit it from abroad or are stored within it, but maintaining peace and tranquillity addresses itself to hear the speaker, it will be “silent,” as Moses commands, and thus be able to listen with complete attention. Otherwise it will have no such power."
            ],
            [
                "[14] For the ignorant then it is well to keep silence, but for those who desire knowledge and also love their master, frank speech is a most essential possession. Thus we read in Exodus, “The Lord will war for you and ye shall be silent,” and at once there follows a divine oracle in these words, “What is it that thou shoutest to me?” (Ex. 14:14, 15). The meaning is that those should keep silent who have nothing worth hearing to say, and those should speak who have put their faith in the God-sent love of wisdom, and not only speak with ordinary gentleness but shout with a louder cry. That cry is not made with mouth and tongue, through which, as we are told, the air assumes a spherical shape and thus is rendered perceptible by the sense of hearing, but by the organ of the soul, uniting all music in its mighty tones, heard by no mortal whatsoever, but only by Him Who is uncreated and imperishable.",
                "[15] For the sweet and harmonious melody of the mind’s music can only be apprehended by the mind’s musician, not by any of those who are entangled in sense. But when the full organ of the understanding sounds forth its symphony of the single or double octave, the Hearer asks—asks we may call it, though He does not really ask, since all things are known to God—“What is it that thou criest so loud to me?” Is it in supplication for ills to be averted, or is in thanksgiving for blessings imparted, or in both?"
            ],
            [
                "[16] And he that seemed to be feeble of speech and slow of tongue and wordless is found to be so loquacious, that in one place he is represented as not only speaking, but shouting, and in another as pouring forth a stream of words without cessation or pause.",
                "[17] For “Moses,” we read, “was talking to God, and God was answering him with a voice” (Ex. 19:19). We do not have the tense of completed action “he talked,” but the tense of prolonged and continuous action “he was talking”; and similarly God did not teach him (as a complete action) but was answering him always and uninterruptedly.",
                "[18] Now an answer always pre-supposes a question; and everyone asks what he does not know, because he thinks it good to learn and is aware that of all the steps which he can take to get knowledge, the most profitable is to seek, to ask questions, to think that he has no knowledge, and not to imagine that he has a firm apprehension of anything.",
                "[19] Now wise men take God for their guide and teacher, but the less perfect take the wise man; and therefore the Children of Israel say “Talk thou to us, and let not God talk to us lest we die” (Ex. 20:19).",
                "But the man of worth has such courage of speech, that he is bold not only to speak and cry aloud, but actually to make an outcry of reproach, wrung from him by real conviction, and expressing true emotion.",
                "[20] Take the words “if Thou wilt forgive them their sin, forgive them; but if not, blot me out of the book which Thou hast written” (Ex. 32:32); and “Did I conceive all this people in the womb, or did I bring them forth, because Thou sayest unto me, ‘take them to thy bosom, as a nurse lifts the suckling’?” (Num. 11:12); or again “Whence shall I get flesh to give to this people, because they weep against me? Shall sheep and oxen be slaughtered, or all the meat that is in the sea be collected and suffice?” (Num. 11:13, 22). Or “Lord, why hast Thou afflicted this people and why hast Thou sent me? And ever since I went to Pharoah to speak in Thy name, he has afflicted the people, and Thou hast not saved Thy people” (Ex. 5:22, 23). Anyone would have feared to say these or like words, even to one of the kings of particular kingdoms; yet he had the courage to utter these thoughts to God.",
                "[21] He reached this limit, I will not say of daring in general but of good daring, because all the wise are friends of God, and particularly so in the judgement of the most holy lawgiver. Frankness of speech is akin to friendship. For to whom should a man speak with frankness but to his friend? And so most excellent is it, that in the oracles Moses is proclaimed the friend of God (Ex. 33:11), to shew that all the audacities of his bold discourse were uttered in friendship, rather than in presumption. For the audacity of rashness belongs to the presumptuous, the audacity of courage or confidence to a friend."
            ],
            [
                "[22] But observe on the other hand that confidence is blended with caution. For while the words “What wilt thou give me” (Gen. 15:2) shew confidence, “Master,” shews caution. While Moses usually employs two titles in speaking of the Cause, namely God and Lord, here he uses neither, but substitutes “Master.” In this he shews great caution and exactness in the use of terms. It is true that “Lord” and “Master” are said to be synonyms.",
                "[23] But though one and the same thing is denoted by both, the connotations of the two titles are different. Κύριος (Lord) is derived from κῦρος (power) which is a thing secure and is the opposite of insecure and invalid (ἄκυρος), while δεσπότης (master) is from δεσμός (bond) from which I believe comes δέος (fear). Thus δεσπότης is a lord and something more, a terrible lord so to speak, one who is not only invested with the lordship and sovereignty of all things, but is also capable of inspiring fear and terror; perhaps too, since he is the bond of all things, one who holds them together indissolubly and binds them fast, when in themselves they are dissoluble.",
                "[24] He who says, “Master, what wilt thou give me?” virtually says no less than this, “I am not ignorant of Thy transcendent sovereignty; I know the terrors of Thy power; I come before Thee in fear and trembling, and yet again I am confident. For Thou hast vouchsafed to bid me fear not;",
                "[25] Thou hast given me a tongue of instruction that I should know when I should speak (Isaiah 50:4), my mouth that was knitted up Thou hast unsewn, and when Thou hadst opened it, Thou didst strengthen its nerves for speech; Thou hast taught me to say what should be said, confirming the oracle ‘I will open thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt speak’ (Ex. 4:12).",
                "[26] For who was I, that Thou shouldst impart speech to me, that Thou shouldst promise me something which stood higher in the scale of goods than ‘gift’ or grace, even a ‘reward’. Am I not a wanderer from my country, an outcast from my kinsfolk, an alien from my father’s house? Do not all men call me excommunicate, exile, desolate, disfranchised?",
                "[27] But Thou, Master, art my country, my kinsfolk, my paternal hearth, my franchise, my free speech, my great and glorious and inalienable wealth.",
                "[28] Why then shall I not take courage to say what I feel? Why shall I not inquire of Thee and claim to learn something more? Yet I, who proclaim my confidence, confess in turn my fear and consternation, and still the fear and the confidence are not at war within me in separate camps, as one might suppose, but are blended in a harmony.",
                "[29] I find then a feast which does not cloy in this blending, which has schooled my speech to be neither bold without caution, nor cautious without boldness. For I have learnt to measure my own nothingness, and to gaze with wonder on the transcendent heights of Thy loving-kindnesses. And when I perceive that I am earth and cinders or whatever is still more worthless, it is just then that I have confidence to come before Thee, when I am humbled, cast down to the clay, reduced to such an elemental state, as seems not even to exist."
            ],
            [
                "[30] And the watchful pen of Moses has recorded this my soul’s condition in his memorial of me. For Abraham, he says, drew near and said, ‘Now I have begun to speak to the Lord, and I am earth and ashes’ (Gen. 18:27), since it is just when he knows his own nothingness that the creature should come into the presence of his Maker.",
                "[31] The words ‘What wilt Thou give me?’ are the cry not so much of uncertainty as of thankfulness for the multitude and greatness of the blessings which one has enjoyed. ‘What wilt Thou give me?’ he says. Is there aught still left for me to expect? Lavish indeed, Thou bounteous God, are Thy gifts of grace, illimitable without boundary or end, welling up like fountains to replace and more than replace what we draw.",
                "[32] But we should look not only to the ever-flowing torrent of Thy loving-kindnesses but also to the fields—they are ourselves—which are watered by them. For it the stream pour forth in over-abundance, the plain will be marshy and fenny, instead of fruitful soil. I need then that the inflow on me should be in due measure for fertility, not unmeasured.",
                "[33] Therefore I will ask ‘What wilt Thou give me?’ Thou whose gifts have been countless, almost to the very sum of what human nature can contain. For all that I still seek to learn and to gain is but this ‘Who should be a worthy heir of thy benefits?’",
                "[34] Or shall I go hence childless (Gen. 15:2), the recipient of a boon shortlived, dying with the day, passing swiftly to its doom; I, who pray for the opposite, a boon of many days and years, proof against decay or death, so that it can lay the seed and extend the roots, which shall make the growth secure, and raise and uplift the stalk heavenwards.",
                "[35] For man’s excellence must not tread the earth, but press upwards to heaven, that it may banquet there on incorruption and remain unscathed for ever.",
                "[36] For I know that Thou, who givest being to what is not and generatest all things, hast hated the childless and barren soul, since Thou hast given as a special grace to the race of them that see that they should never be without children or sterile. And I myself having been made a member of that race justly desire an heir. For when I contemplate the race’s security from extinction, I hold it a deep disgrace to leave my own desire of excellence to come to naught.",
                "[37] Therefore I beseech and supplicate that out of the smouldering tinder and embers the saving light of virtue may burn up with full flame and carried on as in the torch-race by unfailing succession may be coeval with the world.",
                "[38] Also in the votaries of practice Thou hast implanted a zeal to sow and beget the children of the soul, and when they are thus endowed they have cried out in their pleasure, ‘The children, wherewith Thou hast shewn mercy to Thy servant’ (Gen. 33:5). Of such children innocence is the nurse and fostermother; their souls are virgin and tender and rich in nature’s gifts, ready to receive the glorious and divine impressions of virtue’s graving.",
                "[39] Tell me this too, whether the son of Masek, she who was born in my house, is fit to become the heir of thy gifts of grace. For till now I have not received him whom I hope for, and he, whom I have received, is not the heir of my hopes.”"
            ],
            [
                "[40] Who Masek and her son are is a matter for careful consideration. Well, the name Masek is interpreted “From a kiss.” Now “kiss” is not the same as “loving.” The latter appears to signify the uniting of souls which goodwill joins together, the former merely the bare superficial salutation, which passes when some occasion has caused a meeting.",
                "[41] For just as in ἀνακύπτειν (rising up) there is no idea of κύπτειν (stooping) nor in καταπίνειν (swallowing) the whole idea of πίνειν (drinking), nor in μάρσιππος (pouch) that of ἵππος (horse), so neither in καταφιλεῖν (kissing) do we have φιλεῖν (loving). For people bowing to the hard necessities of life in hundreds of cases greet their enemies thus.",
                "[42] Who then she is, with whom we are brought into contact “from” or “in consequence of a kiss,” and not from true friendship, I will shew without disguise. It is the life of the senses, the assured possession of us all, for which all have a feeling of affection. The multitude regard her as a mistress, the good as their servant, not a servant of alien race or purchased with money, but homeborn and in a sense a kinswoman. The wise have been trained to greet her with a kiss, but not to love her, the others to love her deeply and regard her worthy of a triple measure of their affection.",
                "[43] Now Laban the virtue-hater will not be able even to kiss the qualities which are allotted to the Man of Practice. Still since he has made hypocrisy and false inventions the cardinal principle of his life, he says, as though in dudgeon, though he has no real grief, “I was not held worthy to kiss my children and my daughters” (Gen. 31:28). The refusal of the kiss is natural and proper. For we the children have been trained to hate dissimulation, with a hatred that refuses all dealing.",
                "[44] Hold then the virtues dear, embrace them with thy soul and love them truly, and thou wilt never desire to be the maker of that travesty of friendship, the kiss. “Have they, we shall say, any part or inheritance in your home? Were they not counted as aliens in your sight, or have you not sold them and devoured the money?” (Gen. 31:14, 15). You devoured the price of their redemption, lest you should ever again be able to buy them back. And now you pretend to wish to kiss them, you in the judgement of all their deadly foe.",
                "Moses on the other hand will not kiss his father-in-law, but loves him with genuine heart-felt affection. For “he loved him” we read “and they greeted each other” (Ex. 18:7)."
            ],
            [
                "[45] Now there are three kinds of life, one looking Godwards, another looking to created things, another on the border-line, a mixture of the other two. The God-regarding life has never come down to us, nor submitted to the constraints of the body. The life that looks to creation has never risen at all nor sought to rise, but makes its lair in the recesses of Hades and rejoices in a form of living, which is not worth the pains.",
                "[46] It is the mixed life, which often drawn on by those of the higher line is possessed and inspired by God, though often pulled back by the worse it reverses its course. And when the better life placed as a weight on the scales completely preponderates, the mixed life carried with it makes the opposite life seem light as air in the balance.",
                "[47] Now Moses while he gives the crown of undisputed victory to the Godward kind of life, brings the other two into comparison by likening them to two women, one of whom he calls the beloved and the other the hated.",
                "[48] These names are very suitable, for who does not look with favour on the pleasures and delights that come through the eyes, or the ears, or through taste and smell and touch? Who has not hated the opposites of these?—frugality, temperance, the life of austerity and knowledge, which has no part in laughter and sport, which is full of anxiety and cares and toils, the friend of contemplation, the enemy of ignorance, which puts under its feet money and mere reputation and pleasure, but is mastered by self-restraint and true glory and the wealth which is not blind but sees.",
                "Now the children of virtue, the hated one, are always the senior."
            ],
            [
                "[49] And Moses holds them to be by their nature worthy of the rights of the senior, even though they be younger in point of years, for he gives them the double portion, and takes from the others their half-share. “For if a man,” he says, “has two wives, one beloved and one hated, and both bear him children, when he purposes to divide his possessions, he shall not be able to adjudge the elder’s rights to the son of the beloved (that is, of Pleasure) for he is but ‘young,’ even if years have made him grey-headed, but to the son of Prudence, the hated wife, the son who from earliest childhood is an ‘elder,’ he must give these rights and thus assign to him a double portion” (Deut. 21:15–17).",
                "[50] Now we have given the allegorical interpretation of this more closely elsewhere and therefore let us turn to the next part of our theme. One thing however we must first point out, namely that we are told that God by opening the womb of the hated wife brought to its rising the birth of worthy practices and excellent deeds, while she, who was thought to be beloved, immediately became barren.",
                "[51] For “the Lord” it runs “seeing that Leah is hated opened her womb, but Rachel was barren” (Gen. 29:31). Is it not just then, when the soul is pregnant and begins to bear what befits a soul, that all objects of sense become barren and incapable of childbearing, those objects which find acceptance with us “from the kiss” and not through genuine friendship."
            ],
            [
                "[52] This life of the senses, then, which he calls Masek, has for her son each one among us who honours and admires the nurse and foster-mother of our mortal race, that is Sense, on whose just-fashioned form the earthly mind, called Adam, looked and gave the name of what was his own death to her life.",
                "[53] “For Adam,” it says, “called the name of his wife ‘Life,’ because she is the mother of all things living” (Gen. 3:20), that is doubtless of those who are in truth dead to the life of the soul. But those who are really living have Wisdom for their mother, but Sense they take for a bond-woman, the handiwork of nature made to minister to knowledge.",
                "[54] The name of the child born of the life which we have explained as the “life from a kiss” he puts before us as Damascus, which is interpreted as “the blood of a sackcloth robe.” By sackcloth robe he intimates the body, and by blood the “blood-life,” and the symbolism is very powerful and apt.",
                "[55] We use “soul” in two senses, both for the whole soul and also for its dominant part, which properly speaking is the soul’s soul, “just as the eye can mean either the whole orb, or the most important part, by which we see. And therefore the lawgiver held that the substance of the soul is twofold, blood being that of the soul as a whole, and the divine breath or spirit that of its most dominant part. Thus he says plainly “the soul of every flesh is the blood” (Lev. 17:11).",
                "[56] He does well in assigning the blood with its flowing stream to the riot of the manifold flesh, for each is akin to the other. On the other hand he did not make the substance of the mind depend on anything created, but represented it as breathed upon by God. For the Maker of all, he says, “blew into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7); just as we are also told that he was fashioned after the image of his Maker (Gen. 1:27)."
            ],
            [
                "[57] So we have two kinds of men, one that of those who live by reason, the divine inbreathing, the other of those who live by blood and the pleasure of the flesh. This last is a moulded clod of earth, the other is the faithful impress of the divine image.",
                "[58] Yet this our piece of moulded clay, tempered with blood for water, has imperative need of God’s help, and thus we read “this Damascus Eliezer.” Now Eliezer interpreted is “God is my helper,” for this mass of clay and blood, which in itself is dissoluble and dead, holds together and is quickened as into flame by the providence of God, who is its protecting arm and shield, since our race cannot of itself stand firmly established for a single day.",
                "[59] Observe, too, that the second son of Moses bears the same name. “The name of the second,” he says, “was Eliezer,” and then he adds the reason: “for the God of my father is my helper and delivered me from the hand of Pharoah” (Ex. 18:4).",
                "[60] But those who still consort with the life of sense and blood suffer the attacks of the spirit so expert in scattering pious thoughts and deeds, the spirit called Pharoah, whose tyranny rife with lawlessness and cruelty it is impossible to escape, unless Eliezer be born in the soul and looks with hope to the help which God the only Saviour can give.",
                "[61] Right well, too, does Moses describe Damascus as the son not of his father but of his mother, Masek, to shew us that the blood-soul, by which irrational animals also live, has kinship with the maternal and female line, but has no part in male descent.",
                "[62] Not so was it with Virtue or Sarah, for male descent is the sole claim of her, who is the motherless ruling principle of things, begotten of her father alone, even God the Father of all. For “indeed,” it runs, “she is my sister from the father, not from the mother” (Gen. 20:12)."
            ],
            [
                "[63] So much for the elucidation needed as a preliminary; for the problem was seen to involve obscurities and difficulties. We must now explain more exactly what it is that the lover of learning seeks to know. Surely it is something of this kind: “Can he who desires the life of the blood and still claims for his own the things of the senses become the heir of divine and incorporeal things?”",
                "[64] No; one alone is held worthy of these, the recipient of inspiration from above, of a portion heavenly and divine, the wholly purified mind which disregards not only the body, but that other section of the soul which is devoid of reason and steeped in blood, aflame with seething passions and burning lusts.",
                "[65] His question, we see, takes this form: “Since thou hast not given me that other seed, the mentally perceived, the self-taught, the divine of form, shall the child of my household be my heir, he who is the offspring of the blood-life?”",
                "[66] At that point God in His turn hastens to forestall the questioner, with a message of instruction, which we may almost say anticipates his speaking. For “straightway,” we are told, “a voice of God came to him with the words ‘He shall not be thy heir’ ” (Gen. 15:4). No, none of those who fall under the evidence which the senses give. For it is incorporeal natures that inherit intellectual things.",
                "[67] The wording is chosen very carefully. Moses does not say “God said” or “God spake,” but “a voice of God came to him.” It suggests a loud, sonorous, continuous appeal, pitched so as to spread abroad throughout the soul, whereby no part shall be left to which its right instruction has not penetrated, but all are filled from end to end with sound learning."
            ],
            [
                "[68] Who then shall be the heir? Not that way of thinking which abides in the prison of the body of its own free will, but that which released from its fetters into liberty has come forth outside the prison walls, and if we may so say, left behind its own self. For “he who shall come out of thee,” it says, “shall be thy heir” (Gen. 15:4).",
                "[69] Therefore, my soul, if thou feelest any yearning to inherit the good things of God, leave not only thy land, that is the body, thy kinsfolk, that is the senses, thy father’s house (Gen. 12:1), that is speech, but be a fugitive from thyself also and issue forth from thyself. Like persons possessed and corybants, be filled with inspired frenzy, even as the prophets are inspired.",
                "[70] For it is the mind which is under the divine afflatus, and no longer in its own keeping, but is stirred to its depths and maddened by heavenward yearning, drawn by the truly existent and pulled upward thereto, with truth to lead the way and remove all obstacles before its feet, that its path may be smooth to tread—such is the mind, which has this inheritance.",
                "[71] To that mind I say, “Fear not to tell us the story of thy departure from the first three. For to those who have been taught to give ear to the things of the mind, thou ever repeatest the tale.” “I migrated from the body,” she answers, “when I had ceased to regard the flesh; from sense, when I came to view all the objects of sense as having no true existence, when I denounced its standards of judgement as spurious and corrupt and steeped in false opinion, and its judgements as equipped to ensnare and deceive and ravish truth away from its place in the heart of nature; from speech, when I sentenced it to long speechlessness, in spite of all its self-exaltation and self-pride.",
                "[72] Great indeed was its audacity, that it should attempt the impossible task to use shadows to point me to substances, words to point me to facts. And, amid all its blunders, it chattered and gushed about, unable to present with clear expression those distinctions in things which baffled its vague and general vocabulary.",
                "[73] Thus through experience, as a foolish child learns, I learnt that the better course was to quit all these three, yet dedicate and attribute the faculties of each to God, who compacts the body in its bodily form, who equips the senses to perceive, and extends to speech the power of speaking.”",
                "[74] Such is the mind’s confession, and to it I reply, “even as thou hast quitted the others, quit thyself, depart from thyself.” And what does this “departing” mean? It means “do not lay up as treasure for thyself, thy gifts of thinking, purposing, apprehending, but bring them and dedicate them to Him Who is the source of accurate thinking and unerring apprehension.”"
            ],
            [
                "[75] This dedication will be enshrined in the holier of the great sanctuaries. For two such sanctuaries, we feel, exist, one sensible, one mental. This world is the cathedral of the sense-perceived order, the world which the mind discovers of the truly invisible order.",
                "[76] Now that he who has gone forth from us and desires to be God’s attendant is the heir of the glorious wealth that nature has to give is testified by Moses in the words “He led him out outside and said ‘Look up into heaven’ ” (Gen. 15:5). For heaven is the treasury of divine blessings. “May the Lord,” he says, “open to thee His good treasure, the heaven” (Deut. 28:12)—that heaven from which the bountiful Giver rains down continually His most perfect joys. Yes, look up, and thus convict of their errors the multitude of common men, the blind race, which has lost the sight which it thinks it possesses.",
                "[77] How could it be other than blind, when it prefers bad to good, base to honourable, unjust to just, and again lower passions to higher emotions, the mortal to the immortal; when once more it shuns the voice of the warner and the censor, and with them conviction and instruction, while it welcomes flatterers and the words that lead to pleasure, the makers of idleness and ignorance and luxury?",
                "[78] And so it is only the man of worth who sees, and therefore they of old called prophets “seers” (1 Sam. 9:9). He who advances “outside” is called not only the seer, but the seer of God, that is Israel.",
                "But the others even if they do ever open their eyes have bent them earthwards; they pursue the things of earth and their conversation is with the dwellers in Hades.",
                "[79] The one extends his vision to the ether and the revolutions of the heaven; he has been trained also to look stedfastly for the manna, which is the word of God, the heavenly incorruptible food of the soul which delights in the vision. But the others see but the onions and the garlic, which give great pain and trouble to their eyes and make them close, or the other ill-smelling things, the leeks and dead fishes, which are food proper to Egypt;",
                "[80] “we remember,” they say, “the fishes which we used to eat in Egypt freely, the cucumbers and the gourds, the leeks, the onions, the garlic. But now our soul is dried up, our eyes have nothing to look to, save the manna” (Num. 11:5, 6)."
            ],
            [
                "[81] There is a moral bearing too in the phrase “He led him out outside,” which some, because of the grossness of their moral sense, are in the habit of holding up to ridicule. “Can any be led out inside,” they ask, “or conversely go in outside?” “Indeed they can,” I would reply. In your ludicrous, thoughtless folly you have never learnt to trace the ways of the soul, but only of bodies, and all you look for is their movements from place to place. Therefore it seems to you a contradiction in terms that one should go out inside or go in outside. But we the disciples of Moses find nothing conflicting in such phrases.",
                "[82] Would you not agree that the high priest whose heart is not perfect is both inside and outside, when he is performing the ancestral rites in the inmost shrine; inside in his visible body, outside in his wandering vagrant, soul; and on the contrary that one who loves and is loved by God, even if he is not of the consecrated line, though he stands outside the sacred limits abides right inside them? For he holds all his life in the body to be a sojourning in a foreign land, but when he can live in the soul alone, he feels that he is a dweller in his fatherland.",
                "[83] Every fool is outside the threshold, even if he spend the livelong day within, nor leave it for a moment; and every wise man is inside it though he be separated from it not merely by countries but even by vast latitudes. And in Moses’ view a friend is so near that he differs not a whit from one’s own soul, for he says, “the friend, who is equal to thy soul” (Deut. 13:6).",
                "[84] Again, according to Moses, the priest when he goes into the holy of holies “will not be a man until he comes out” (Lev. 16:17); no man, that is, in the movements of his soul though in the bodily sense he is still a man. For when the mind is ministering to God in purity, it is not human, but divine. But when it ministers to aught that is human, it turns its course and descending from heaven, or rather falling to earth, comes forth, even though his body still remains within.",
                "[85] Most rightly, then, is it said, “He led him out outside,” outside of the prison-houses of the body, of the lairs where the senses lurk, of the sophistries of deceitful word and thought; above all He led him out of himself, out of the belief that he thought and apprehended through an intelligence which acknowledged no other authority and owed no allegiance to any other than itself."
            ],
            [
                "[86] When the Lord led him outside He said “Look up into heaven and count the stars, if thou canst count their sum. So shall be thy seed” (Gen. 15:5). Well does the text say “so” not “so many,” that is, “of equal number to the stars.” For He wishes to suggest not number merely, but a multitude of other things, such as tend to happiness perfect and complete.",
                "[87] The seed shall be, He says, as the ethereal sight spread out before him, celestial as that is, full of light unshadowed and pure as that is, for night is banished from heaven and darkness from ether. It shall be the very likeness of the stars, marshalled in goodly array, following an unswerving order which never varies or changes.",
                "[88] For He wished to picture the soul of the Sage as the counterpart of heaven, or rather, if we may so say, transcending it, a heaven on earth having within it, as the ether has, pure forms of being, movements ordered, rhythmic, harmonious, revolving as God directs, rays of virtues, supremely starlike and dazzling. And if it be beyond our powers to count the stars which are visible to the senses, how much more truly can that be said of those which are visible to the mind.",
                "[89] For I hold that even as of the two faculties of judgement one is better and one worse, since mind is better than sense and sense duller than understanding, even so do the objects which these two faculties judge differ; and thus things intelligible vastly exceed in number the things perceptible by sense. The eyes of the body are but the tiniest part of the eye of the soul. That is like the sun; the others are like candles, whose business is to be lighted and extinguished."
            ],
            [
                "[90] The words “Abraham believed God” (Gen. 15:6) are a necessary addition to speak the praise due to him who has believed. Yet, perhaps it may be asked, do you consider this worthy of praise? When it is God who speaks and promises, who would not pay heed, even though he were the most unjust and impious of mankind?",
                "[91] To such a questioner we will answer, “Good sir, do not without due scrutiny rob the Sage of his fitting tribute, or aver that the unworthy possess the most perfect of virtues, faith, or censure our claim to knowledge of this matter.",
                "[92] For if you should be willing to search more deeply and not confine yourself to the mere surface, you will clearly understand that to trust in God alone and join no other with Him is no easy matter, by reason of our kinship with our yokefellow, mortality, which works upon us to keep our trust placed in riches and repute and office and friends and health and strength and many other things.",
                "[93] To purge away each of these, to distrust created being, which in itself is wholly unworthy of trust, to trust in God, and in Him alone, even as He alone is truly worthy of trust—this is a task for a great and celestial understanding which has ceased to be ensnared by aught of the things that surround us.”"
            ],
            [
                "[94] And it is well said “his faith was counted to him for justice” (Gen. 15:6), for nothing is so just or righteous as to put in God alone a trust which is pure and unalloyed.",
                "[95] Yet this act of justice and conformity with nature has been held to be a marvel because of the untrustfulness of most of us. And it is in reproof of us that the holy text tells us, that to rest on the Existent only, firmly and without wavering, though it is a marvel in the sight of men who have no hold of good things unsullied, is deemed no marvel at the judgement-bar of truth, but just an act of justice and nothing more."
            ],
            [
                "[96] The text continues “He said to him, I am the God who brought thee out of the land of the Chaldaeans, to give thee this land to inherit” (Gen. 15:7). These words indicate not only a promise, but also the confirmation of an old promise.",
                "[97] The good bestowed in the past was his departure from Chaldaean sky-lore, which taught the creed that the world was not God’s work, but itself God, and that to all existing things the vicissitudes of better and worse are reckoned by the courses and ordered revolutions of the stars, and that on these depends the birth of good and ill. The even tenour, the uniformly ordered motion of the heavenly bodies have induced weak-minded people to adopt this fantastic creed. Indeed, the name Chaldaean when interpreted corresponds to even tenour or levelness.",
                "[98] The new good gift is inheritance of the wisdom which cannot be received by sense, but is apprehended by a wholly pure and clear mind. Through this wisdom the best of all migrations becomes an established fact, the migration of the soul which passes from astrology to real nature study, from insecure conjecture to firm apprehension, and to give it its truest expression, from the created to the uncreated, from the world to its Maker and Father.",
                "[99] Thus the oracles tell us that those whose views are of the Chaldaean type have put their trust in heaven, while he who has migrated from this home has given his trust to Him who rides on the heaven and guides the chariot of the whole world, even God. Excellent indeed is this heritage, too great it may be for the powers of the recipient, but worthy of the greatness of the Giver."
            ],
            [
                "[100] But it is not enough for the lover of wisdom to have high hopes and vast expectations through the oracular promises. If he does not know in what way he will attain the succession of the heritage, it irks him greatly; so thirsty is he for knowledge and insatiate of it. And therefore he asks, “Master, by what shall I know that I shall inherit it?” (Gen. 15:8).",
                "[101] Now perhaps it may be said that this question is inconsistent with the belief ascribed to him. It is the doubter, we may be told, who feels difficulties; what the believer does is to cease from further questioning. We must say, then, that the difficulties and the fact of belief are both there, but do not apply to the same subject. Far from it! He has believed that he will be the inheritor of wisdom; he merely asks how this shall come to pass. That it will come to pass is a fact that he has completely and firmly grasped in virtue of the divine promises.",
                "[102] And so his Teacher praising the desire for learning which he shews, begins His instruction with a rudimentary lesson, in which the first and most vital words are “take for me” (Gen. 15:9). A short phrase, but with a wide meaning, for it suggests not a few thoughts.",
                "[103] First it says to us “you have no good thing of your own, but whatever you think you have, Another has provided.” Hence we infer that all things are the possession of Him who gives, not of creation the beggar, who ever holds out her hands to take.",
                "[104] The second is “even if you take, take not for yourself, but count that which is given a loan or trust and render it back to Him who entrusted and leased it to you, thus as is fit and just requiting goodwill with goodwill.” His was the earlier, yours is the later; His made the advance, yours shall repay."
            ],
            [
                "[105] For vast is the number of those who repudiate the sacred trusts and in their unmeasured greed use up what belongs to Another as though it was their own. But thou, my friend, try with all thy might, not merely to keep unharmed and unalloyed what thou hast taken, but also deem it worthy of all carefulness, that He who entrusted it to thee may find nothing to blame in thy guardianship of it.",
                "[106] Now the Maker of all that lives has given into thy trust soul, speech, and sense, which the sacred scripture calls in its parable heifer, ram, and goat (Gen. 15:9). Some in their selfishness at once annex these, others store them up, to repay when the moment for repayment has come.",
                "[107] Those who appropriate the trust are countless in number. For which of us does not assert that soul and sense and speech, each and all are his own possession, thinking that to perceive, to speak, to apprehend, rest with himself alone.",
                "[108] But small is the number of those who guard the trust as something holy and inviolable. These have dedicated these three, soul, sense, and speech, to God, for they “took” them all for God, not for themselves; so that they naturally acknowledge that through Him come the activities of each, the reflections of the mind, the language in which speech expresses itself, the pictures presented to sense.",
                "[109] Those, then, who assert their ownership of the three, receive the heritage which their miserable state deserves; a soul malevolent, a chaos of unreasoning passions, held down by a multitude of vices; sometimes mauled by greed and lust, like a strumpet in the stews, sometimes fast bound as in a prison by a multitude of ill deeds, herded with malefactors, not of human kind, but habits which an unanimous judgement has declared worthy of arrest; speech brow-beating, keen-edged against truth, working harm to its victims and shame to its employers; sense insatiable, ever imbibing the objects of sense, yet through its uncontrolled avidity incapable of reaching satisfaction, regardless of its monitors, blind, deaf and derisive to all that they preach for its benefit.",
                "[110] But those who have “taken,” not for themselves but for God, have dedicated each of the three to Him, guarding them for the Owner, as in truth sanctified and holy: the thinking faculty, that it should think of nothing else but God and His excellences; speech, that with unbridled mouth it should honour the Father of all with laud and hymn and benediction, that it should concentrate all the graces of expression to be exhibited in this task only; sense, that it should report faithfully and honestly to the soul the pictures presented to it by the whole world within its ken, heaven and earth and the intermediate forms of nature, both living creatures and plants, their activities, their faculties, their conditions whether in motion or rest.",
                "[111] For God has permitted the mind to comprehend of itself the world of the mind, but the visible world only through sense. Oh! if one can live with all the parts of his being to God rather than to himself, using the eye of sense to penetrate into the objects of sense and thus discover the truth, using the soul to study the higher verities of mental things and real existences, using the organ of his voice to laud both the world and its Maker, he will live a happy and blessed life."
            ],
            [
                "[112] This is what I hold the words “take for me” to suggest. Here is another illustration. When God willed to send down the image of divine excellence from heaven to earth in pity for our race, that it should not lose its share in the better lot, he constructs as a symbol of the truth the holy tabernacle and its contents to be a representation and copy of wisdom.",
                "[113] For the oracle tells us that the tabernacle “was set up in the midst of our uncleanness” (Lev. 16:16) that we may have wherewith to scour and wash away all that defiles our life, miserable and laden with ill fame as it is.",
                "Let us consider, then, how he bade them contribute the ways and means needed for the building of the tabernacle. “The Lord spake unto Moses,” it says, saying: “Speak to the sons of Israel and take ye for me first beginnings; from all who are so minded in their heart, ye shall take my first beginnings” (Ex. 25:1, 2).",
                "[114] Here then also we have an exhortation not to take for ourselves but for God, closely considering who the Giver is and doing no damage to the gifts, but preserving them undamaged and faultless, aye perfect and complete. In this dedication of the beginnings to God Moses teaches us a high truth. For indeed the beginnings of things both material and immaterial are found to be by God only.",
                "[115] Look well, if you would have knowledge, at each several kind, plants, living creatures, arts, sciences. What of the first beginnings of plants? Do they consist in the dropping of the seed by the farmer, or are they the invisible works of invisible nature? What of the generation of men and the other animals? Are not the parents as it were the accessories, while nature is the original, the earliest and the real cause?",
                "[116] So again with the arts and sciences. Is not nature the underlying fact, the fountain or root or foundation, or whatever name you give to the beginning which precedes all else, and is not the lore of each science a superstructure built on nature, whereas if we do not start with this as a groundwork, all that lore is imperfect? It was this, I take it, which led someone to say so aptly",
                "The beginning is half the whole.",
                "In these words the hidden meaning of “beginning” is nature, the underlying root as it were, the setting needed for growth in each case, to whose credit the writer assigned half the whole."
            ],
            [
                "[117] Not without reason then did the oracle dedicate “beginnings” to the great Leader, God. And elsewhere he says “The Lord spake unto Moses saying ‘sanctify to me every first born, first in generation, which openeth every womb among the sons of Israel from man to beast. It is to Me’ ” (Ex. 13:1, 2).",
                "[118] Thus it is admitted here also that the first in time and value are God’s possessions and especially the first in generation. For since genus in every case is indestructible, to the indestructible God will it be justly assigned. And that is true too of one who opens the womb of all from man, that is reason and speech, to beast, that is sense and body.",
                "[119] For he that opens the womb of each of these, of mind, to mental apprehensions, of speech, to the activities of the voice, of the senses, to receive the pictures presented to it by objects, of the body, to the movements and postures proper to it, is the invisible, seminal artificer, the divine Word, which will be fitly dedicated to its Father.",
                "[120] And as the beginnings are God’s, so also are the ends. Moses testifies to this when he bids set apart and accord the end to the Lord (Num. 31:28 ff.). And what happens in the world testifies to it also.",
                "[121] How so? you ask. In the plant the seed is the beginning and the fruit the end, and both are the work of nature, not of husbandry. Again in science, the beginning, as has been shewn, is nature, but its limit is actually outside the range of human possibilities. For no one reaches perfection in any of his pursuits, but undoubtedly all perfection and finality belong to One alone. And so we are fain to range in the borderland between beginning and end, learning, teaching, tilling, and whatever work we carry on, labouring with the sweat of our brow, as it were, that the mere creature may seem to accomplish something.",
                "[122] Still more clearly indeed does Moses acknowledge that beginnings and ends are willed by God, when he says in the creation-story, “In the beginning He made”(Gen. 1:1), and afterwards, “God finished the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 2:1, 2).",
                "[123] And so in the text we are treating, He says “take ye for Me,” thus giving to Himself what is His due and bidding us not to adulterate the gifts, but guard them in a way worthy of the Giver. And again elsewhere, He that has no need of aught and therefore takes nothing will acknowledge that He “takes,” in order to train us to piety, and to implant a zeal for holiness, and to spur us to His service, as one who welcomes and accepts the free-will homage and genuine service of the soul.",
                "[124] For He says “behold, I have taken the Levites in place of everyone who opens the womb from among the sons of Israel; they shall be their ransom” (Num. 3:12). So then we take and give, but in the full sense of the word we take only; it is by a license of language that we are said to give, for the reasons which I have mentioned. Note that He gives the Levites a correct name in calling them “ransom.” For nothing so well redeems the mind to freedom, as to take refuge with God and become His suppliant. And such is the profession of the consecrated tribe of Levi."
            ],
            [
                "[125] We have said what was fitting on these points. Let us now return to the original subject, for we postponed much of what requires precise discussion. Take for me, it says, a “heifer” unyoked, undamaged, tender, young and fresh in spirit, a soul, that is, which can easily receive guidance and instruction and ruling; “take for me a ram,” that is speech active in argument and fully developed, competent to analyse and refute the sophisms of controversialists and to provide its possessor with a safe and well-ordered life;",
                "[126] take for me also the sense that dashes and darts on to the sensible world, the she-goat that is; and take them all three years old, that is, formed according to the perfect number with beginning, middle and end.",
                "And further take for me a turtle-dove and a pigeon, that is divine and human reason, both of them winged creatures, skilled by practice to speed upwards, yet differing from each other, as the genus differs from the species, or the copy from the archetype.",
                "[127] For Divine wisdom is a lover of solitudes, since loneliness is dear to her because of the solitary God who is her owner, and thus in parable she is called the turtle-dove. The other is gentle and tame and sociable, frequenting the cities of men and pleased to dwell with mortals. Men liken her to a pigeon."
            ],
            [
                "[128] These virtues Moses, I think, spoke of in allegory when he named the midwives of the Hebrews, Zipporah and Phuah (Ex. 1:15), for Zipporah is by interpretation “bird” and Phuah “ruddy.” It is a special property of divine wisdom that it ever soars aloft like a bird, of human wisdom that it implants modesty and discretion; and a blush, where the matter calls for blushing, is the clearest proof of the presence of these qualities.",
                "[129] “Abraham took all these for Him” (Gen. 15:10) says the text. These words speak the praise of the man of worth who faithfully and honestly guards the sacred trust, which he has received of soul, sense, and speech, of divine wisdom and human knowledge, but guards it not for himself, but solely for Him who gave the trust.",
                "[130] Then he continues, “he divided them in the middle,” but he does not add who this “he” is. He wishes you to think of God who cannot be shewn, as severing through the Severer of all things, that is his Word, the whole succession of things material and immaterial whose natures appear to us to be knitted together and united. That severing Word whetted to an edge of utmost sharpness never ceases to divide.",
                "[131] For when it has dealt with all sensible objects down to the atoms and what we call “indivisibles,” it passes on from them to the realm of reason’s observation and proceeds to divide it into a vast and infinite number of parts. It divides the “plates of gold,” as Moses tells us, “into hairs” (Ex. 37:10), that is into length without breadth, like immaterial lines.",
                "[132] So it divided each of the three in the middle, the soul into rational and irrational, speech into true and false, sense into presentations, where the object is real and apprehended, and presentations where it is not. These sections He at once placed “opposite to each other,” rational to irrational, true to false, apprehending to non-apprehending. The birds He left undivided, for incorporeal and divine forms of knowledge cannot be divided into conflicting opposites."
            ],
            [
                "[133] The subject of division into equal parts and of opposites is a wide one, and discussion of it essential. We will neither omit nor protract it, but abridge it as far as possible and content ourselves with the vital points only. Just as the great Artificer divided our soul and limbs in the middle, so too, when He wrought the world, did He deal with the being of all that is.",
                "[134] This He took and began to divide as follows. First He made two sections, heavy and light, thus distinguishing the element of dense from that of rare particles. Then again He divided each of these two, the rare into air and fire, the dense into water and land, and these four He laid down as first foundations, to be the sensible elements of the sensible world.",
                "[135] Again He made a second division of heavy and light on different principles. He divided the light into cold and hot, giving to the cold the name of air and to the naturally hot the name of fire. The heavy He divided into wet and dry, and He called the dry “land” and the wet “water.”",
                "[136] Each of these was subjected to further dissections. Land was divided into continents and islands, water into sea and rivers and into drinkable and undrinkable, air into the changes which mark summer and winter, and fire into the merely useful variety, which is also voracious and destructive, and on the other hand the preservative variety which was set apart to form the heaven.",
                "[137] Just as He divided the main constituents of the universe, so did He also with their subdivisions. These are partly living and partly lifeless. Among the lifeless some remain in the same place, held together by the tie of “cohesion”; others move by expansion, without changing their position, vitalized by a natural and unconscious growth, and among them, those which are of wild stuff produce wild fruits, which serve for food to the beasts of the field. Others are of a stuff which admits of cultivation, the management of which is a charge allotted to husbandry, and these produce fruits for the enjoyment of the animal most removed from the wild, that is man.",
                "[138] Further, as He had divided the lifeless, so did He with those which participate in life, distinguishing one species as rational, the other as irrational. Then again He split up each of these. The irrational He divided into the domesticated and undomesticated, and the rational into immortal and mortal.",
                "[139] Of the mortal He made two portions, one of which He named men, the other women. And while following one principle He split up the animal kingdom as a whole into male and female, it was also subjected to other necessary partitions, which distinguished the winged from land animals, these from the aquatic, the last named being intermediate to the other two.",
                "[140] Thus God sharpened the edge of his all-cutting Word, and divided universal being, which before was without form or quality, and the four elements of the world which were formed by segregation from it, and the animals and plants which were framed with them as materials."
            ],
            [
                "[141] But the text not only says “He divided” but also “He divided them in the middle”; and it is therefore necessary to make a few remarks on the subject of equal sections, for when anything is divided exactly in the middle it produces equal sections.",
                "[142] Now no man can divide anything into equal sections with exactitude, but one of the sections is sure to be either less or greater than the other. Even if there is no great difference, there must always be a small one which easily eludes our perception, which by nature and habit establishes contact with masses of greater volume, but is unable to grasp those which do not admit of partition or division.",
                "[143] No created thing is found to produce equality if tested by the unprejudiced standard of truth. It seems, then, that God alone is exact in judgement and alone is able to “divide in the middle” things material and immaterial, in such a way that no section is greater or less than another by even an infinitesimal difference, and each can partake of the equality which is absolute and plenary.",
                "[144] Now if equality had only one form, what has been said would be enough; but as it has several forms we must not shrink from adding what is fitting.",
                "The term “equal” is applied in one way to numbers, as when we say that two is equal to two, and three to three, and the same with other numbers. It is applied in another way to magnitudes, the dimensions of which are lengths, breadths and depths. For one handbreadth is equal to another handbreadth and one cubit to another cubit in magnitude. Other things again are equal in capacity or force, as is the case with weights and measures of content.",
                "[145] One essential form of equality is the proportional, in which the few are regarded as equal to the many, and the small to the greater. This is often employed by states on special occasions when they order each citizen to make an equal contribution from his property, not of course numerically equal, but equal in the sense that it is proportionate to the valuation of his estate, so that one who had paid 100 drachmas might be considered to have given a sum equal to one who paid a talent."
            ],
            [
                "[146] In the light of this preliminary sketch, observe how God in “dividing in the middle,” actually did divide equally according to all the forms of equality, when he created the universe. First, as to equality of number he made the light parts equal in number to the heavy parts, earth and water which are heavy being two, and fire and air which are naturally light being two also. Again by this division we have one and one in the driest and the wettest, that is earth and water, and in the coldest and the hottest, that is air and fire. In the same way we have one and one in darkness and light, in day and night, in winter and summer, in spring and autumn, and in the other examples of the same nature.",
                "[147] For equality of magnitude, He gave us the parallel circles in heaven, those of the equinox in spring and autumn, and those of the solstice in summer and winter, while on earth there are the zones, two of which are equal to each other, namely those which adjoin the poles, frigid and therefore uninhabited, and two which are bordered by the last named and the torrid zone, these two habitable, as we are told, because of their temperate climate, one of them on the south side and the other on the north.",
                "[148] The time intervals, too, are equal in length, the longest day to the longest day and the shortest to the shortest and the two which come half-way to each other. And equality in magnitude in the other days and nights is shewn particularly well in the equinoxes.",
                "[149] For from the spring equinox to the summer solstice something is continually taken from the night and added to the day, until the longest day and shortest night are finally reached. And after the summer solstice the sun turns back along the same course, moving neither quicker nor slower, but with the same unchanging intervals, and thus maintaining equal speed it reaches the autumn equinox, and after completing the equality of day and night begins to increase the night and diminish the day until the winter solstice.",
                "[150] And when it has brought the night to its longest and the day to its shortest, it turns back again observing the same intervals and arrives at the spring equinox. In this way the time intervals, though they seem to be unequal, may lay claim to equality of magnitude, not indeed at the same, but at different seasons of the year."
            ],
            [
                "[151] Much the same may be observed in the parts of living animals, particularly of men. For one foot or one hand is equal in magnitude to the other and in almost all cases the same holds that the right side is equal to the left.",
                "As for equality in force or capacity there is a host of examples in both wet and dry substances, of which we form our estimate by means of measures of content, balances and the like.",
                "[152] As for proportional equality, we find it practically in everything great or small, throughout the whole world. Those who have most carefully examined the facts of nature say that the four elements are proportionally equal, and that the whole world received and retains for ever its frame, through being compounded according to this same proportion, which assigned an equal measure to each of the parts.",
                "[153] They tell us, too, that our four constituents, dry, wet, cold and hot, have been mixed and harmonized by proportional equality and that we are nothing more than a compound of the four factors mixed on this principle."
            ],
            [
                "[154] If we went into each case, we could prolong the consideration of the subject to infinity. For we should find on observation that the smallest animals are proportionally equal to the largest, as the swallow to the eagle, the mullet to the whale, and the ant to the elephant. For their body, soul and feelings, whether of pain or pleasure, and also their affinities and their aversions and every other sensation of which animal nature is capable, are with hardly an exception alike when equalized by the rule of proportion.",
                "[155] On this principle some have ventured to affirm that the tiny animal man is equal to the whole world, because each consists of body and reasonable soul, and thus they declare that man is a small world and alternatively the world a great man.",
                "[156] This pronouncement of theirs is not wide of the mark. They judge that the master art of God by which He wrought all things is one that admits of no heightening or lowering of intensity but always remains the same and that through its transcendent excellence it has wrought in perfection each thing that is, every number and every form that tends to perfectness being used to the full by the Maker."
            ],
            [
                "[157] For He judged equally about the little and the great, to use Moses’ words (Deut. 1:17), when He generated and shaped each thing, nor was He led by the insignificance of the material to diminish, or by its splendour to increase, the art which He applied.",
                "[158] For all craftsmen of repute, whatever materials they use, whether they be costly or of the cheapest, wish so to use them, that their work shall be worthy of praise. In fact people have been known to produce a higher class of work with the cheaper than with the more costly substances; their feeling for beauty was enhanced and by additional science they wished to compensate for inferiority of material.",
                "[159] But with God no kind of material is held in honour, and therefore He bestowed upon them all the same art, and in equal measure. And so in the holy Scriptures we read, “God saw all things which He had made and behold, they were very good” (Gen. 1:31), and things which receive the same praise must be of equal honour in the eyes of the praiser.",
                "[160] Now God praised not the material which He had used for His work, material soul-less, discordant and dissoluble, and indeed in itself perishable, irregular, unequal, but He praised the works of His own art, which were consummated through a single exercise of power equal and uniform, and through knowledge ever one and the same. And thus by the rules of proportion everything was accounted similar and equal to everything else, according to the principle which His art and His knowledge followed."
            ],
            [
                "[161] Moses too above all others shews himself a eulogist of equality; first by always and everywhere lauding justice too whose special property it is, as the name itself seems to shew, to divide into two equal parts things material and immaterial; secondly by censuring injustice, the creator of inequality in its most hateful form.",
                "[162] Inequality is the mother of the twins, foreign war and civil war, just as its opposite, equality, is the mother of peace. Moses presents most clearly his glorification of justice and his censure of injustice, when he says “ye shall do nothing unjust in judgement, in measures, in weights, in balances; your balances shall be just, your weights just and your measures just and your quart just” (Lev. 19:35, 36) and in Deuteronomy, “There shall not be in thy bag divers weights, great and small: there shall not be in thy house divers measures, great and small. A true and a just weight thou shalt have, that thy days may be long in the land, which the Lord thy God gives thee in inheritance, because every one who doeth these things is an abomination to the Lord, every one who doeth injustice (Deut. 25:13–16).",
                "[163] So then the God who loves justice hates and abominates injustice, the source of faction and evil.",
                "As for equality, the nurse of justice, where does the Lawgiver fail to shew his approval? We find it first in the story of the creation of the whole heaven. “God separated,” he says, “between the light and between the darkness, and God called the light day and the darkness night” (Gen. 1:4, 5).",
                "[164] For equality gave day and night, light and darkness, their place among the things which are. Equality too divided the human being into man and woman, two sections unequal indeed in strength, but quite equal as regards what was nature’s urgent purpose, the reproduction of themselves in a third person. “God made man,” he says, “made him after the image of God. Male and female He made”—not now “him” but “them” (Gen. 1:27). He concludes with the plural, thus connecting with the genus mankind the species which had been divided, as I said, by equality."
            ],
            [
                "[165] Then he mentions cold and heat, summer and spring, the seasons of the year, as being separated by the same divider, equality (Gen. 8:22). Again the three days before the sun’s creation are equal in number to the three which followed it (Gen. 1:5 ff.), the whole six being divided by equality to express time and eternity. For God dedicated the three before the sun to eternity, and the three after it to time, which is a copy of eternity.",
                "[166] And the primary Potencies of the Existent, namely that through which He wrought the world, the beneficent, which is called God, and that by which He rules and commands what He made, that is the punitive, which bears the name of Lord, are as Moses tells us, separated by God Himself standing above and in the midst of them. “I will speak to thee,” it says, “above the mercy-seat in the midst of the two Cherubim” (Ex. 25:21). He means to shew that the primal and highest Potencies of the Existent, the beneficent and the punitive, are equal, having Him to divide them."
            ],
            [
                "[167] Again, are not the slabs of the ten general laws, which he calls tables, two, thus equal in number to the parts of the soul, the rational and irrational, which must be trained and chastened? These tables too were cut by the Divine Legislator and by Him only. For “the tables were the work of God and the writing on them was the writing of God, graven on the tables” (Ex. 32:16).",
                "[168] Further, the ten words on them, divine ordinances in the proper sense of the word, are divided equally into two sets of five, the former comprising duties to God, and the other duties to men.",
                "[169] The first commandment among the duties to God, is that which opposes the creed of polytheism, and its lesson is that the world has one sole ruler. The second forbids us to make gods of things which are not the causes of existence, employing for that purpose the mischievous arts of the painter and sculptor which Moses expelled from his common-wealth and sentenced to perpetual banishment. The purpose of this law is that the sole and true god may be duly honoured.",
                "[170] The third is concerned with the name of the Lord, not that name the knowledge of which has never even reached the world of mere becoming—He that is cannot be named in words—but the name which is given to His Potencies. We are commanded not to take this name in vain. The fourth is concerned with the number Seven, the ever-virgin, the motherless. Its purpose is that creation, observing the inaction which it brings, should call to mind Him who does all things invisibly.",
                "[171] The fifth is about honouring parents. This is of the sacred kind, since its reference is not to men, but to Him who causes all things to be sown and come into being, through whom it is that the father and mother appear to generate, though they do not really do so, but are the instruments of generation.",
                "[172] This commandment was graven on the borderline between the set of five which makes for piety to God and the set which comprises the prohibitions against acts of injustice to our fellows. The mortal parentage is but the final form which immortal powers take. They in virtue of their nature generate all things, but have permitted mortality also at the final stage to copy their creative art and to beget. For God is the primary cause of generation, but the nethermost and least honoured kind, the mortal-kind, is the ultimate.",
                "[173] The other set of five forbids adultery, murder, theft, false witness, covetousness. These are general rules forbidding practically all sins, and to them the specific sins may in each case be referred."
            ],
            [
                "[174] To pass to a different matter, you find the same division into equal parts in the permanent sacrifices, both in the oblation of fine flour, which the priests offer for themselves, and in that offered on behalf of the nation, consisting of the two lambs which they are ordered to bring. In both these the law prescribes that half of the offerings named shall be sacrificed in the morning and half in the evening (Lev. 6:20; Ex. 29:38, 39), that God may be thanked both for the day-time and the night-time blessings which He showers upon all.",
                "[175] Observe also the loaves set forth upon the holy table, how the twelve are divided into equal parts and placed in sets of six each, as memorials of the twelve tribes, half of them belonging to Leah or Virtue the mother of six patriarchs, and half to the children of Rachel and the base-born sons of the concubines.",
                "[176] You see, too, how the two emeralds on the long robe, one on the right and one on the left, are divided equally, on which are cut the names of the twelve patriarchs, six on each, inscribed by divine graving, to remind us of divine beings (Ex. 28:9–12).",
                "[177] Once more, does not Moses take two mountains, that is symbolically two kinds, and again distinguishes between them according to proportional equality, assign one to those who bless, the other to those who curse? Then he places upon them the twelve patriarchs (Deut. 27:11–13) to shew to those who need warning, that curses are equal in number to blessings and (if we may say so without offence) of equal value.",
                "[178] For praises given to the good and censure given to the bad are equally beneficial, since, in the judgement of men of sense, avoiding evil and choosing good are one and the same."
            ],
            [
                "[179] I am deeply impressed, too, by the contrast made between the two he-goats offered for atonement, and the difference of fate assigned to them even when the division is effected by that uncertain and fortuitous divider, the lot. We see two ways of thinking; one whose concern is with things of divine virtue is consecrated and dedicated to God; the other whose aspirations turn to poor miserable humanity is assigned to creation the exile. For the lot which fell to creation is called by the oracles the lot of dismissal (Lev. 16:8), because creation is a homeless wanderer, banished far away from wisdom.",
                "[180] Further, nature abounds in things which bear some shape or stamp and others which do not, even as it is with coins, and you may note how the invisible Severer divides them all into equal parts and awards those that are approved by their stamp to the lover of instruction, but those that have no stamp or mark to the man of ignorance. For we are told “the unmarked fell to Laban, but the marked to Jacob” (Gen. 30:42).",
                "[181] For the soul is a block of wax, as one of the ancients said, and if it is hard and resistent it rejects and shakes off the attempted impressions and inevitably remains an unformed mass, whereas if it is docile and reasonably submissive it allows the imprints to sink deep into it, and thus reproducing the shape of the seal preserves the forms stamped upon it, beyond any possibility of effacement."
            ],
            [
                "[182] Marvellous too is the equal distribution of the sacrificial blood which the high priest Moses, following Nature’s guidance, made. He took, we read, the half of the blood and poured it into mixing-bowls and the half he poured upon the altar (Ex. 24:6), to shew us that sacred wisdom is of a twofold kind, divine and human.",
                "[183] The divine kind is without mixture or infusion and therefore is poured as an offering to God, who knows no mixture or infusion and is in His isolation a unity. But the human is mixed with infusion and thus is scattered abroad upon us, who are a mixed compounded product of infusion, to create in us oneness of mind and fellowship, and in fact a “mixing” of our various parts and ways of conduct. But the part of the soul which is free from mixture and infusion is the mind in its perfect purity.",
                "[184] This mind filled with the breath of inspiration from heaven above is guarded from malady and injury, and then reduced to a single element is fitly rendered in its entirety as a holy libation to Him who inspired it and guarded it from all evil that could harm it. The mixed kind is the senses, and for this nature has created the proper mixing-bowls.",
                "[185] The eyes are the “bowls” of sight, the ears of hearing, the nostrils of the sense of smell, and each of the others has its fitting vessel. On these bowls the holy Word pours of the blood, desiring that our irrational part should be quickened and become in some sense rational, following the divine courses of the mind, and purified from the objects of sense, which lure it with all their deceitful and seductive force.",
                "[186] And was not the consecrated didrachmon portioned out on the same principle? We are meant to consecrate one half of it, the drachma, and pay it as ransom for our own soul (Ex. 30:12, 13), which God who alone is truly free and a giver of freedom releases with a mighty hand from the cruel and bitter tyranny of passions and wrongdoings, if we supplicate him, sometimes too without our supplication. The other half we are to leave to the unfree and slavish kind of which he is a member who says “I have come to love my master,” that is “the mind which rules within me,” and my wife, that is “sense” the friend and keeper of the passion’s household, “and the children,” that is the evil offspring of the passions. “I will not go out free” (Ex. 21:5).",
                "[187] For to such a kind, as its share in the didrachmon, must needs be given the lot which is no lot, the lot of dismissal which is the opposite of the dedicated drachma. The drachma is a unit, and a unit admits neither of addition nor subtraction, being the image of God who is alone in His unity and yet has fullness.",
                "[188] Other things are in themselves without coherence, and if they be condensed, it is because they are held tight by the divine Word, which is a glue and bond, filling up all things with His being. He who fastens and weaves together each separate thing is in literal truth full of His own self, and needs nothing else at all."
            ],
            [
                "[189] With reason then will Moses say, “He that is rich shall not add, and he that is poor shall not diminish, from the half of the didrachmon” (Ex. 30:15). That half, as I said, is both a drachma and a unit, to which every number might well address the words of the poet,",
                "With thee I’ll cease, with thee I will begin.",
                "[190] For the whole series of numbers to infinity multiplied by infinity ends when resolved in the unit and begins with the unit when arranged in an unlimited series. And therefore those who study such questions declare that the unit is not a number at all, but the element and source from which number springs.",
                "[191] Further, the heavenly food of the soul, wisdom, which Moses calls “manna,” is distributed to all who will use it in equal portions by the divine Word, careful above all things to maintain equality. Moses testifies to this in the words, “He that had much, had not too much, and he that had less did not lack” (Ex. 16:18), when they measured by the admirable and precious standard of proportion. And through this we come to understand how when each collected in his own store for his “belongings,” these belongings are not human beings so much as thoughts and dispositions. For what fell to each was of set purpose so allotted, that there was neither short-coming nor superabundance."
            ],
            [
                "[192] We may find a similar example of this proportioned equality in what is called the Passover, which is held when the soul studies to unlearn irrational passion and of its own free will experiences the higher form of passion which reason sanctions.",
                "[193] For it is laid down that “if there be few in the house, so that they are not enough for the sheep, they shall take in the next neighbour, according to the number of souls, that each may reckon what is sufficient for him” (Ex. 12:4), thus gaining the portion which he deserves and needs.",
                "[194] On the other hand, when Moses would portion out virtue, like a country, to virtue’s inhabitants he bids the more have more and the less to lessen their possession (Num. 35:8), for he holds it right not to adjudge smaller shares to the greater, since then they will be devoid of knowledge, nor greater to the less, since they will not be able to contain the greatness of their shares."
            ],
            [
                "[195] Of numerical equality we have the clearest example in the sacred gifts of the twelve rulers (Num. 7:10 ff.) and further in the distributions made to the priests from the gifts. Each of the sons of Aaron, it says, shall have what is equal (Lev. 6:14).",
                "[196] We have also a splendid example of equality in the composition of the frankincense offering. For we read “take to thyself sweet spices, oil drop of cinnamon, cloves and galbanum of sweetening and clear gum of frankincense, each in equal parts and they shall make of it incense, a perfume work of the perfumer of pure composition, a holy work” (Ex. 30:34, 35). Each of the parts, we see from his words, must be brought in equal measure, to make the combination of the whole.",
                "[197] Now these four, of which the incense is composed, are, I hold, a symbol of the elements, out of which the whole world was brought to its completion. Moses is likening the oil drop to water, the cloves to earth, the galbanum to air, and the clear gum to fire. For oil drop is watery because of its dripping, cloves are dry and earthy, and the words “of sweetening” are added to galbanum, to bring out the idea of air since air has fragrance, and the word “clear” to gum to indicate light.",
                "[198] For the same reason he set the heavy substances apart from the light, connecting the latter in a single phrase by means of the conjunction “and,” but stating the heavy in the unconnected form. First he said “take to thyself sweet spices, oil drop of cinnamon, cloves, both these with the asyndeton, symbols of the heavy substances earth and water.” Then he makes a fresh beginning using the conjunction, “and galbanum of sweetness and clear gum of frankincense,” and these two, which indicate the light elements, air and fire, are also joined by an “and.”",
                "[199] And the mixture thus harmoniously compounded proves to be that most venerable and perfect work, a work in very truth holy, even the world, which he holds should under the symbol of the incense offering give thanks to its Maker, so that while in outward speech it is the compound formed by the perfumer’s art which is burnt as incense, in real fact it is the whole world, wrought by divine wisdom, which is offered and consumed morning and evening in the sacrificial fire.",
                "[200] Surely it is a fitting life-work for the world, that it should give thanks to its Maker continuously and without ceasing, wellnigh evaporating itself into a single elemental form, to shew that it hoards nothing as treasure, but dedicates its whole being at the shrine of God its Begetter."
            ],
            [
                "[201] I marvel too when I read of that sacred Word, which ran in impetuous breathless haste “to stand between the living and the dead.” For at once, says Moses, “the breaking was abated” (Num. 16:47, 48). And indeed how could all that shatters and crushes and ruptures our soul fail to be abated and lightened, when the God-beloved separates and walls off the consecrated thoughts, which veritably live, from the unholy which are truly dead?",
                "[202] For often proximity to the sick brings to the very healthiest the infection of their sickness and sure death in its train. But this fate was no longer possible to the consecrated, hedged in by the mightiest of pales, fixed in the midst to repel from the better sort the onslaught and inroads of the worse.",
                "[203] Still more am I lost in admiration, when I listen to the oracles and learn how the cloud entered in the midst between the hosts of Egypt and Israel (Ex. 14:20). For the further pursuit of the sober and God-beloved race by the passion-loving and godless was forbidden by that cloud, which was a weapon of shelter and salvation to its friends, and of offence and chastisement to its enemies.",
                "[204] For on minds of rich soil that cloud sends in gentle showers the drops of wisdom, whose very nature exempts it from all harm, but on the sour of soil, that are barren of knowledge, it pours the blizzards of vengeance, flooding them with a deluge of destruction most miserable.",
                "[205] To His Word, His chief messenger, highest in age and honour, the Father of all has given the special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator. This same Word both pleads with the immortal as suppliant for afflicted mortality and acts as ambassador of the ruler to the subject.",
                "[206] He glories in this prerogative and proudly describes it in these words ‘and I stood between the Lord and you’ (Deut. 5:5), that is neither uncreated as God, nor created as you, but midway between the two extremes, a surety to both sides; to the parent, pledging the creature that it should never altogether rebel against the rein and choose disorder rather than order; to the child, warranting his hopes that the merciful God will never forget His own work. For I am the harbinger of peace to creation from that God whose will is to bring wars to an end, who is ever the guardian of peace.”"
            ],
            [
                "[207] Having taught us the lesson of equal division the Scripture leads us on to the knowledge of opposites, by telling us that “He placed the sections facing opposite each other” (Gen. 15:10). For in truth we may take it that everything in the world is by nature opposite to something else. Let us begin with what comes first.",
                "[208] Hot is opposite to cold, dry to wet, light to heavy, darkness to light, night to day. In heaven we have the course of the fixed stars opposite to the course of the planets, in the air cloudless to cloudy, calm to wind, summer to winter, spring when earth’s growths bloom to autumn when they decay, again in water, sweet to bitter, and in land, barren to fruitful.",
                "[209] And the other opposites are obvious: corporeal, incorporeal; living, lifeless; mortal, immortal; sensible, intelligible; comprehensible, incomprehensible; elementary, completed; beginning, end; becoming, extinction; life, death; disease, health; white, black; right, left; justice, injustice; prudence, folly; courage, cowardice; continence, incontinence; virtue, vice; and all the species of virtue are opposite to all the species of vice.",
                "[210] Again we have the opposite conditions of the literary and the illiterate, the cultured and the uncultured, the educated and the uneducated, and in general the scientific and the unscientific, and in the subject matter of the arts or sciences there are vocal sounds or vowels and non-vocal sounds or consonants, high notes and low notes, straight lines and curved lines.",
                "[211] In animals and plants there are barren and productive, prolific and unprolific, viviparous and oviparous, soft-skinned and shell-skinned, wild and tame, solitary and gregarious.",
                "[212] In another class there are poverty and riches; eminence and obscurity; high birth and low birth; want and abundance; war, peace; law, lawlessness; gifted nature, ungifted nature; labour, inaction; youth, age; impotence, power; weakness, strength. Why attempt to ennumerate all and each of them, when their number is infinite and illimitable?",
                "[213] How excellent then is this lesson, which the interpreter of Nature’s facts in his pity for our sluggishness and carelessness lavishes on us always and everywhere, as he does in this passage, that in every case it is not where things exist as wholes, but where they exist as divisions or sections, that they must be “set facing opposite each other.” For the two opposites together form a single whole, by the division of which the opposites are known.",
                "[214] Is not this the truth which according to the Greeks Heracleitus, whose greatness they celebrate so loudly, put in the fore front of his philosophy and vaunted it as a new discovery? Actually, as has been clearly shewn, it was Moses who long ago discovered the truth that opposites are formed from the same whole, to which they stand in the relation of sections or divisions."
            ],
            [
                "[215] This point will be discussed in detail elsewhere. But there is another matter which should not be passed over in silence. What are called the half-pieces of the three animals when they are divided into two made six altogether and thus the Severer, the Word, who separates the two sets of three and stationed himself in their midst, was the seventh.",
                "[216] The same is clearly shewn, I think, in the holy candlestick also, which is wrought with six branches, three on each side, and itself in the middle makes the seventh, dividing and separating the threes. It is “chased,” a work of art, approved and divine, made “of one piece of pure gold” (Ex. 25:36). For the One, alone and absolutely pure, has begotten the Seven, whom no mother bore, begotten her by himself alone, and employing no other medium whatsoever.",
                "[217] Now those who sound the praises of gold, among its many laudable qualities, place these two highest, first that it is proof against rust, secondly that when it is beaten and fused into the thinnest possible sheets, it remains unbroken. Thus it naturally becomes the symbol of a higher nature, which when stretched and fused and reaching out on every side, is still complete in its fullness throughout and weaves everything else into a harmonious whole.",
                "[218] Again, of the aforesaid candlestick the Master-craftsman says in his discourse that “there are branchlets jutting out from the branches, three on each side, equal to each other, and their lamps at the end of them come out from them in nut shape, and the flower-patterns in them, that the candle-bearers may be on them, and the seventh flower-pattern at the end of the lamp, on the top above, all of solid gold, and seven golden candle-bearers on it” (Ex. 38:15–17).",
                "[219] Thus by many proofs it is now established that the Six is divided into two Threes by the Word, the Seventh in their midst, just as we find in the present passage. For the whole candlestick with its principal parts, six in number, consists of sevens, seven lamps, seven flower-patterns, seven candle-bearers.",
                "[220] The six candle-bearers are divided by the seventh, and so also the flower-patterns by the middle one, and the lamps in the same way by their seventh in the middle, and the six branches and the six branchlets which grow out of them by the main-stalk of the candlestick, which is seventh to them."
            ],
            [
                "[221] On each of these there is much to say, but it must be postponed to another occasion. Only thus much should be noted. The holy candlestick and the seven candle-bearers on it are a copy of the march of the choir of the seven planets.",
                "[222] How so? perhaps we shall be asked. Because, we shall reply, each of the planets is a light-bringer, as the candle-bearers are. For they are supremely bright and transmit the great lustre of their rays to the earth, especially the central among the seven, the sun.",
                "[223] I call it central, not merely because it holds the central position, which some give as the reason, but because apart from this it has the right to be served and attended by its squires on either side, in virtue of its dignity and magnitude and the benefits which it provides for all that are on the earth.",
                "[224] Now the order of the planets is a matter of which men have no sure apprehension—indeed is there any other celestial phenomenon which can be known with real certainty?—and therefore they fall back on probabilities. But the best conjecture, in my opinion, is that of those who assign the middle place to the sun and hold that there are three above him and the same number below him. The three above are Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, and the three below are Mercury, Venus and the Moon, which borders on the lower region of air.",
                "[225] So the Master-craftsman, wishing that we should possess a copy of the archetypal celestial sphere with its seven lights, commanded this splendid work, the candlestick, to be wrought. We have shewn, too, its resemblance to the soul. For the soul is tripartite, and each of its parts, as has been shewn, is divided into two, making six parts in all, to which the holy and divine Word, the All-severer, makes a fitting seventh."
            ],
            [
                "[226] Another point too should not be passed over in silence. The furniture of the sanctuary is threefold, candlestick, table and altar of incense. In the altar, as was shewn above, we have the thought of thanksgiving for the elements, for the altar itself contains parts of the four elements. Its wood is of earth, the incense offered on it of water, since it is first melted and then resolved into drops, while the perfume is of air and the part which is ignited of fire; moreover the compound made of frankincense, galbanum, cloves and oil of cinnamon (Ex. 30:34) is a symbol of the elements. In the table we have thanksgiving for the mortal creatures framed from these elements, since loaves and libations, which creatures needing food must use, are placed on it. In the candlestick we have thanksgiving for all the celestial world, that so no part of the universe may be guilty of un-thankfulness and we may know that all its parts give thanks, the elements and the creatures framed from them, not only those on earth, but those in heaven."
            ],
            [
                "[227] A question worth consideration is why the writer states the measurements of the table and the altar but says nothing about the measurements of the candlestick. Probably the reason is that the four elements and the mortal creatures framed from them, which are symbolized by the table and the altar, are measured and defined within limits by heaven, since that which contains is the measurement of that which is contained. On the other hand heaven, which is symbolized by the candlestick,",
                "[228] is of infinite magnitude, not comprehended by any material substance either equal in size to it or infinite, nor again, as Moses shews, by a void, the existence of which is implied in the marvelmongers’ fable of the general conflagration. God is its boundary,",
                "[229] God who guides and steers it. And so just as the Existent is incomprehensible, so also that which is bounded by Him is not measured by any standards which come within our powers of conception. Perhaps too it is immeasurable in the sense that being circular and rounded off into a perfect sphere it possesses neither length nor breadth."
            ],
            [
                "[230] Having said what was fitting on these matters, Moses continues, “the birds He did not divide” (Gen. 15:10). He gives the name of birds to the two words or forms of reason, both of which are winged and of a soaring nature. One is the archetypal reason above us, the other the copy of it which we possess.",
                "[231] Moses calls the first the “image of God,” the second the cast of that image. For God, he says, made man not “the image of God” but “after the image” (Gen. 1:27). And thus the mind in each of us, which in the true and full sense is the “man,” is an expression at third hand from the Maker, while between them is the Reason which serves as model for our reason, but itself is the effigies or presentment of God.",
                "[232] Our mind is indivisible in its nature. For the irrational part of the soul received a sixfold division from its Maker who thus formed seven parts, sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, voice and reproductive faculty. But the rational part, which was named mind, He left undivided. In this he followed the analogy of the heaven taken as a whole.",
                "[233] For we are told that there the outermost sphere of the fixed stars is kept unsevered, while the inner sphere by a sixfold division produces the seven circles of what we call the wandering stars. In fact I regard the soul as being in man what the heaven is in the universe. So then the two reasoning and intellectual natures, one in man and the other in the all, prove to be integral and undivided and that is why we read “He did not divide the birds.”",
                "[234] Our mind is likened to a pigeon, since the pigeon is a tame and domesticated creature, while the turtle-dove stands as the figure of the mind which is the pattern of ours. For the Word, or Reason of God, is a lover of the wild and solitary, never mixing with the medley of things that have come into being only to perish, but its wonted resort is ever above and its study is to wait on One and One only. So then the two natures, the reasoning power within us and the divine Word or Reason above us, are indivisible, yet indivisible as they are they divide other things without number.",
                "[235] The divine Word separated and apportioned all that is in nature. Our mind deals with all the things material and immaterial which the mental process brings within its grasp, divides them into an infinity of infinities and never ceases to cleave them.",
                "[236] This is the result of its likeness to the Father and Maker of all. For the Godhead is without mixture or infusion or parts and yet has become to the whole world the cause of mixture, infusion, division and multiplicity of parts. And thus it will be natural that these two which are in the likeness of God, the mind within us and the mind above us, should subsist without parts or severance and yet be strong and potent to divide and distinguish everything that is."
            ],
            [
                "[237] After speaking of the birds which were left unsevered and undivided, he continues “and the birds came down to the carcasses, the half-pieces” (Gen. 15:11). He employs the same word “birds.” but shews very clearly to those who have eyes to see the contrast in fact between the two kinds of birds. For it is against nature that birds whose wings were given them to soar on high should come down.",
                "[238] Just as earth is the most suitable place for creatures of the land, particularly reptiles, which in their wriggling course cannot even bear to be above ground, but make for holes and crannies and, since their natural place is below, avoid what is above, so too the air is the suitable habitat for the birds, its natural lightness matching with the lightness which the wings give them. So when the denizens of the air, who should rather be explorers of the realm of ether, “descend,” it is to the land that they come and there they cannot live their natural life.",
                "[239] Conversely Moses gives high approval to those reptiles which can leap upwards. Thus he says, “These shall ye eat of the flying reptiles which go on four legs, which have legs above their feet, so as to leap with them from the earth” (Lev. 11:21). These are symbols of the souls which though rooted like reptiles to the earthly body have been purified and have strength to soar on high, exchanging earth for heaven, and corruption for immortality.",
                "[240] Surely then we must suppose that misery wholesale and all-pervading must be the lot of those souls which reared in air and ether at its purest have left that home for earth the region of things mortal and evil, because the good things of God bred in them an intolerable satiety. And here they become the resort of thoughts and notions, numberless as the subjects with which they are concerned, some willingly admitted, some in mere ignorance. These thoughts are just like winged creatures and it is to them that he likens “the birds which come down.”",
                "[241] Some of our thoughts fly up, others down. To the upward flight falls the better lot, for it has for its fellow-traveller virtue leading it to the divine and heavenly region; to the downward flight the worse lot falls, since vice goes in front and pulls it with might and main if it resists. How opposite are the climes to which these two belong is shewn most clearly by their names. Virtue is so named not only because we choose it (αἵρεσις) but also from its uplifting (ἄρσις), for it is lifted up and soars on high, because it ever yearns for the celestial. Vice is so called because it has “gone down” and compels those who have to do with it to fall down likewise.",
                "[242] Thus thoughts hostile to the soul, when they hover over it or perch upon it, not only come down themselves, but also bring downfall to the understanding, when in hideous fashion they pounce upon things material, not immaterial; which are of the senses, not of the intelligence; of imperfection, not of soundness; of corruption not of life. For they perch not only on bodies, but on sections of bodies divided in two. And it is impossible that bodies so divided should admit of joining or unifying, since the currents of spirit force, which were their congenital ligament, have been broken into."
            ],
            [
                "[243] Moses also brings before us a thought of profound truth in teaching us that justice and every virtue love the soul, while injustice and every vice love the body; that what is friendly to the one is utterly hostile to the other—a lesson given in this passage as elsewhere. For in a figure he pictures the enemies of the soul as birds, eager to intertwine and ingraft themselves in bodies and to glut themselves with flesh, and it is to restrain the onsets and inroads of such that the man of worth is said to sit down in their company (Gen. 15:11), like a chairman or president of a council.",
                "[244] History tells us how when discord reigned at home through civil faction, or hostile bands were at variance, such a one would summon a council of all concerned and investigate the points of difference, that if possible he might by his powers of persuasion make an end of the external war or put down the civil commotion. In the one case he would scatter abroad the foes who rushed in irreconcilable hatred like a storm cloud, in the other he would restore the old feeling of intimate kinship—each a useful work.",
                "[245] Now the list of deadly and irreconcilable enemies of the soul comprises its follies, its acts of cowardice and injustice and all the other irrational lusts so constantly born of over-abundant appetite, which prance and struggle against the yoke and hinder the straight onward course of the understanding, and often rend and overthrow its whole frame.",
                "[246] But with those who might be allies the causes of offence are such as we find in the wranglings of the sophists on questions of dogma. In so far as their minds are fixed on one end to discover the facts of nature, they may be said to be friends, but in that they do not agree in their solutions of particular problems they may be said to be engaged in civil strife. Thus those who declare the universe to be uncreated are at strife with those who maintain its creation; those who say that it will be destroyed with those who declare that though by nature destructible it will never be destroyed, being held together by a bond of superior strength, namely the will of its Maker; those who maintain that nothing is, but all things become, with those who hold the opposite opinion; those who argue at length that man is the measure of all things with those who make havoc of the judgement-faculty of both sense and mind; and, to put it generally, those who maintain that everything is beyond our apprehension with those who assert that a great number of things are cognizable.",
                "[247] And indeed sun and moon and the whole heaven, also earth and air and water and practically all that they produce, have been the cause of strife and contention to the inquirers when they probe into their essential natures and qualities, their changes and phases, the processes by which they come into being and finally cease to be. For as to the magnitude and movement of the heavenly bodies with all their absorbing research they come to different and conflicting opinions, until the man-midwife who is also the judge takes his seat in their midst and observes the brood of each disputant’s soul, throws away all that is not worth rearing, but saves what is worth saving and approves it for such careful treatment as is required.",
                "[248] The history of philosophy is full of discordance, because truth flees from the credulous mind which deals in conjecture. It is her nature to elude discovery and pursuit, and it is this which in my opinion produces these scientific quarrellings."
            ],
            [
                "[249] “About sunset” it continues, “an ‘ecstasy’ fell upon Abraham and lo a great dark terror falls upon him” (Gen. 15:12). Now “ecstasy” or “standing out” takes different forms. Sometimes it is a mad fury producing mental delusion due to old age or melancholy or other similar cause. Sometimes it is extreme amazement at the events which so often happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Sometimes it is passivity of mind, if indeed the mind can ever be at rest; and the best form of all is the divine possession or frenzy to which the prophets as a class are subject.",
                "[250] The first form is mentioned in the curses described in Deuteronomy, where he says that madness and loss of sight and “ecstasy” of mind will overtake the impious, so that they shall differ in nought from blind men groping at noonday as in deep darkness (Deut. 28:28, 29).",
                "[251] The second we have in several places. Isaac was astonished with a great ecstasy and said, “who is it then who has made a hunting and brought to me, and I have eaten of all before thou camest and I blessed him, and let him be blessed” (Gen. 27:33). And again when Jacob disbelieved those who told him that “Joseph lives and is ruler over all Egypt,” he was in an “ecstasy,” we are told, “in his mind, for he did not believe them” (Gen. 45:26). Also in Exodus, in the account of the congregation, it says, “for Mount Sinai was all covered with smoke, because God came down to it in fire and the smoke rose up like vapour of a furnace, and all the people were in a great ‘ecstasy’ ” (Ex. 19:18). Also in Leviticus at the completion of the sacrifices on the eighth day, when “fire came out from heaven and devoured what was on the altar, both the whole burnt offerings and the fats”; for the next words are, “and all the people saw it and were in an ‘ecstasy,’ and fell upon their faces” (Lev. 9:24): a natural consequence, for an “ecstasy” in this sense produces great agitation and terrible consternation.",
                "[252] Incidentally in the story of Jacob and Esau there are thoughts well worthy of our admiration. Esau, though he has the knowledge needed for the chase, is ever hunted and supplanted, because he has acquired his skill not to do good but harm, and moreover is never quick or zealous in his hunting. Jacob hunts passion not through teaching, but moved to it by nature, and brings the game to the tester who will decide whether it will stand the test. For this purpose the tester will eat of all that he brings.",
                "[253] For all the elements of practice are food fit for eating, inquiry, examination, reading, listening to instruction, concentration, perseverance, self-mastery, and power to treat things indifferent as indeed indifferent. Of all these the tester naturally eats samples only, not the whole. For the Practiser must have his proper food left to him, like prizes for his efforts.",
                "[254] Another lesson. The words “before thou camest” are true to nature. For if passion has entered the soul we shall not get enjoyment from self-mastery. Secondly, they convict the bad of sloth and slackness and backwardness to the tasks of instruction, though not to those of incontinence.",
                "[255] And so it is Egypt which has its “task-drivers” (Ex. 5:6) who urge others to the enjoyment of the passions; it is Moses who bids eat the Passover and celebrate the crossing from passion “with haste” (Ex. 12:11). So too Judah, “for if we had not delayed, we should already have returned twice over” (Gen. 43:10). He does not mean “we should have gone down twice to Egypt,” but “we should have come up thence in safety.”",
                "[256] Natural too is the wonder of Jacob that the mind within the body still lives to virtue and rules that body (Gen 45:26), instead of being ruled by it.",
                "In the same way if we went through the other examples we should be able to trace the truth they teach, but the task before us now is not to work these out in detail, and therefore we must turn to the next point.",
                "[257] We have the third sort of ecstasy when Moses finds a lesson of wisdom in the story of the creation of woman. God “cast,” he says, “an ecstasy on Adam and he slept” (Gen. 2:21). Here by ecstasy he means passivity and tranquillity of mind. For sleep of mind is waking of sense, since waking of the understanding is inaction of sense."
            ],
            [
                "[258] The fourth kind of ecstasy we find in the passage we are now examining. “About sunset there fell upon Abraham an ecstasy,” that is, what the inspired and God-possessed experience. Yet it is not merely this experience which proves him a prophet, but we have also the actual word written and recorded in the holy Scriptures, when another tried to take Sarah from his home, Sarah the virtue whose nature is to rule, as though that virtue was not the peculiar possession of the wise and of him alone, but belonged to any who counterfeits good sense. For the text runs, “restore the woman to the man, because he is a prophet and shall pray for thee, and thou shalt live” (Gen. 20:7).",
                "[259] Now with every good man it is the holy Word which assures him his gift of prophecy. For a prophet (being a spokesman) has no utterance of his own, but all his utterance came from elsewhere, the echoes of another’s voice. The wicked may never be the interpreter of God, so that no worthless person is “God-inspired” in the proper sense. The name only befits the wise, since he alone is the vocal instrument of God, smitten and played by His invisible hand.",
                "[260] Thus, all whom Moses describes as just are pictured as possessed and prophesying.",
                "Noah was just. Is he not in the same breath shewn as a prophet? Were not the curses which he called down on subsequent generations, the prayers which he made on their behalf, all of which the actual event confirmed, uttered by him under divine possession?",
                "[261] What of Isaac? What of Jacob? They too are confessed as prophets by many other evidences, but particularly by their speeches addressed to their children. For “Gather ye together that I may proclaim what shall happen to you at the end of the days” (Gen. 49:1) were the words of one inspired. For apprehension of the future does not belong to man.",
                "[262] What of Moses? Is he not everywhere celebrated as a prophet? For it says, “if a prophet of the Lord arise among you, I will be known to him in vision, but to Moses in actual appearance and not through riddles” (Num. 12:6, 8), and again “there no more rose up a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deut. 34:10).",
                "[263] Admirably then does he describe the inspired when he says “about sunset there fell on him an ecstasy.”"
            ],
            [
                "“Sun” is his name under a figure for our mind. For what the reasoning faculty is in us, the sun is in the world, since both of them are light-bringers, one sending forth to the whole world the light which our senses perceive, the other shedding mental rays upon ourselves through the medium of apprehension.",
                "[264] So while the radiance of the mind is still all around us, when it pours as it were a noonday beam into the whole soul, we are self-contained, not possessed. But when it comes to its setting, naturally ecstasy and divine possession and madness fall upon us. For when the light of God shines, the human light sets; when the divine light sets, the human dawns and rises.",
                "[265] This is what regularly befalls the fellowship of the prophets. The mind is evicted at the arrival of the divine Spirit, but when that departs the mind returns to its tenancy. Mortal and immortal may not share the same home. And therefore the setting of reason and the darkness which surrounds it produce ecstasy and inspired frenzy.",
                "[266] To connect what is coming with what is here written he says “it was said to Abraham” (Gen. 15:3). For indeed the prophet, even when he seems to be speaking, really holds his peace, and his organs of speech, mouth and tongue, are wholly in the employ of Another, to shew forth what He wills. Unseen by us that Other beats on the chords with the skill of a master-hand and makes them instruments of sweet music, laden with every harmony."
            ],
            [
                "[267] It is well to hear what these predictions were, which were thus said to him. First that God does not grant as a gift to the lover of virtue that he should dwell in the body as in homeland, but only permits him to sojourn there, as in a foreign country. For “knowing thou shalt know,” he says, “that thy seed shall be sojourners in a land which is not their own” (Gen. 15:3). But every fool takes the body for the place of his nativity and studies to dwell there, not to sojourn.",
                "[268] This is one lesson. Another is that the things of earth which bring slavery and ill-treatment and dire humiliation, to use his own words, are “not our own.” For the passions of the body are truly bastards, outlanders to the understanding, growths of the flesh in which they have their roots.",
                "[269] “And the slavery is for four hundred years”; thus he shews the powers exercised by the four passions. When pleasure rules, the temper is high flown and inflated, uplifted with empty levity. When desire is master, a yearning for what is not arises and suspends the soul on unfulfilled hope as on a noose. For the soul is ever athirst yet never able to drink, suffering the torments of a Tantalus.",
                "[270] Under the sovereignty of grief it is pinched and shrinks, like trees which shed their leaves and wither; for its bloom and richness turn into leanness. Finally when fear has made itself lord no one thinks it good to stand his ground, but abandons himself to flight, expecting that in this alone will safety be found. For while desire has a power of attraction and forces us to the pursuit of the desired object even though it flee from our grasp, fear on the other hand creates a sense of estrangement and sunders and removes us far from the sight we dread."
            ],
            [
                "[271] The sovereignties of the passions here named entail a grievous slavery on their subjects, until God the arbiter and judge makes a separation between the ill-treater and the ill-treated, brings forth the one to full liberty and renders to the other the recompense for his misdeeds.",
                "[272] For we read, “the nation whom they shall serve I will judge, and after this they shall come out hither with much stock” (Gen. 15:14). It must needs be that mortal man shall be oppressed by the nation of the passions and receive the calamities which are proper to created being, but it is God’s will to lighten the evils which are inherent in our race.",
                "[273] So while we shall suffer at first such things as are proper to ourselves, enslaved as we are to cruel masters, God will accomplish the work which is proper to Himself in proclaiming redemption and liberty to the souls which are His suppliants, and not only will He provide release from bonds and an issue from the closely-guarded prison, but give us also the viaticum which he here calls “stock.” What is the meaning of this?",
                "[274] It is when the mind which has come down from heaven, though it be fast bound in the constraints of the body, nevertheless is not lured by any of them to embrace like some hybrid, man-woman or woman-man, the pleasant-seeming evils, but holding to its own nature of true manhood has the strength to be victor instead of victim in the wrestling-bout. Reared in all the lore of the schools, it acquires therefrom a longing for the higher contemplation, and wins the sturdy virtues of self-mastery and perseverance; and thus when the pilgrim wins his return to his native land, he takes with him all these fruits of instruction, which are here called “stock.”"
            ],
            [
                "[275] Having said thus much on these points also he continues, “but thou shalt depart to thy fathers nourished with peace, in a goodly old age”  (Gen. 15:15). So then we who are imperfect are victims both of war and slavery, and hard-won is our release from the terrors which menace us. But the perfect are a race subject neither to war nor slavery, but nourished in peace and freedom sure and secure.",
                "[276] And when he represents the good man as not dying but departing, there is sound doctrine in the words. He would have the nature of the fully purified soul shewn as unquenchable and immortal, destined to journey from hence to heaven, not to meet with dissolution and corruption, which death appears to bring.",
                "[277] After “thou shalt depart” come the words “to thy fathers.” What fathers? This is worth inquiring. For Moses could not mean those who had lived in the land of the Chaldeans, who were the only kinsfolk Abraham had, seeing that the oracle had set his dwelling away from all those of his blood. For we read, “the Lord said unto Abraham ‘depart from thy land and from thy kinsfolk and from the house of thy father unto the land which I shall shew thee, and I will make thee into a great nation’ ” (Gen. 12:1, 2).",
                "[278] Was it reasonable that he should again have affinity with the very persons from whom he had been alienated by the forethought of God? Or that he who was to be the captain of another race and nation should be associated with that of a former age? God would not bestow on him a fresh and in a sense a novel race and nation, if he were not cutting him right adrift from the old.",
                "[279] Surely he is indeed the founder of the nation and the race, since from him as root sprang the young plant called Israel, which observes and contemplates all the things of nature. So we are told to bear out the old from the face of the new (Lev. 26:10). Rightly, for how shall they on whom the rain of new blessings has fallen in all its abundance, sudden and unlooked for, still find profit in old-world lore and the ruts of ancient customs?"
            ],
            [
                "[280] No; by “fathers” he does not mean those whom the pilgrim soul has left behind, those who lie buried in the sepulchres of Chaldaea, but possibly, as some say, the sun, moon and other stars to which it is held that all things on earth owe their birth and framing, or, as others think, the archetypal ideas which, invisible and intelligible <i>there</i>, are the patterns of things visible and sensible <i>here</i>—the ideas in which, as they say, the mind of the Sage finds its new home.",
                "[281] Others again have surmised that by “fathers” are meant the four first principles and potentialities, from which the world has been framed, earth, water, air and fire. For into these, they say, each thing that has come into being is duly resolved.",
                "[282] Just as nouns and verbs and all parts of speech which are composed of the “elements” in the grammatical sense are finally resolved into the same, so too each of us is composed of the four mundane elements, borrowing small fragments from the substance of each, and this debt he repays when the appointed time-cycles are completed, rendering the dry in him to earth, the wet to water, the cold to air, and the warm to fire.",
                "[283] These all belong to the body, but the soul whose nature is intellectual and celestial will depart to find a father in ether, the purest of the substances. For we may suppose that, as the men of old declared, there is a fifth substance, moving in a circle, differing by its superior quality from the four. Out of this they thought the stars and the whole of heaven had been made and deduced as a natural consequence that the human soul also was a fragment thereof."
            ],
            [
                "[284] The words “nourished with peace” are not a pointless addition, but mean that the greater part of the human race are with little exception “nourished” for war and all its attendant evils. Now war sometimes arises from things outside us, waged against us by ill-repute and poverty and mean birth and the like. Sometimes it arises from intestine enemies—in the body, sicknesses, maimings, complete disablements of the senses and numberless other calamities piled on each other; in the soul, passions, diseases and infirmities of mind, the fierce and bitter insurrections, the inexpugnable despotisms of folly and injustice and their fellow usurpers.",
                "[285] So, then, if a man be “nourished with peace” he will depart, having gained a calm, unclouded life, a life of true bliss and happiness.",
                "When will this be found? When there is welfare outside us. welfare in the body, welfare in the soul, the first bringing ease of circumstance and good repute, the second health and strength, the third delight in virtues.",
                "[286] For each part needs its own proper guards. The body is guarded by good repute and unstinted abundance of wealth, the soul by the complete health and soundness of the body, the mind by the acquired lore of the various forms of knowledge. Such is the meaning of the text. For that he is thinking of a peace other than that which states enjoy is clear to those who are versed in the holy Scriptures. For Abraham underwent great and severe wars, which he is shewn to have fought to the finish.",
                "[287] And further, the mere leaving of his fatherland, to emigrate without any possibility of dwelling there again, to be borne hither and thither and to wander over desolate and untrodden roads were in itself a grievous war for one who had no divine message or promise wherein to trust. Still more he had, to crown this profusion of terrors, a third, famine (Gen. 12:10), an evil worse than migration and war.",
                "[288] What kind of peace, then, was his? For surely to be a homeless emigrant, to be confronted by kings with overwhelming forces and to feel the stress of famine would seem to indicate not one war only, but many and manifold.",
                "[289] But if we turn to the allegorical exposition of the words, each of these three proves to be an evidence of peace pure and simple. For dearth and famine of passions, the rout of enemies in the shape of wrongdoings, the migration from the creed of the Chaldeans to the creed of the lovers of God, that is, from the created and sensible to the intelligible and creative Cause—these build up the fabric of good order and stability.",
                "[290] To him who enjoys a peace like this Moses promises a goodly old age, not meaning, we may be sure, the life of long duration, but the life lived wisely. For the welfare of a day ranks as far above multitude of years, as the briefer daylight above an eternity of darkness. It was a wholesome saying of a man of prophetic gifts that he would rather live a single day with virtue than ten thousand years in the shadow of death (Ps. 84[83] 11) where under the figure of death he indicates the life of the wicked.",
                "[291] And Moses in the present instance shews the same by the facts he records rather than by words. For this Abraham, whom he here describes as destined to a goodly old age, is represented by him as more short-lived than practically all who went before him. Thus he shews to us, who are his scholars in wisdom, who it is whose old age is happy, to the end that we should not look with favour on all the abounding vanity of the outward body, a vanity full of shame and rich in reproaches, but recognizing in right judgement and stability of soul that goodly old age, which both in name and nature is twin brother of “reward,” give it its rightful title and testify to its truth.",
                "[292] Learn then thy lesson and hear how the lawgiver tells us that happy old age and longest span of life is only for the good, but briefest is the life of the wicked, since he is ever studying to die or rather has died already to the life of virtue."
            ],
            [
                "[293] Next we have “but in the fourth generation they shall come back hither” (Gen. 15:16). These words are meant not only to state the date at which they should inhabit the holy land, but to bring before us the thought of the complete restoration of the soul. That restoration may be said to come in the fourth generation. How it comes deserves our careful consideration.",
                "[294] The infant from the day of its birth for the first seven years, that is through the age of childhood, possesses only the simplest elements of soul, a soul which closely resembles smooth wax and has not yet received any impression of good or evil, for such marks as it appears to receive are smoothed over and confused by its fluidity.",
                "[295] This is what we may call the first generation of the soul. The second is that which follows childhood and begins to associate with evils, both these engendered by the soul of its own motion, and those which are willingly accepted at the hands of others. For the instructors to sin are legion, nurses and “pedagogues” and parents and the laws of cities, written and unwritten, which extol what should be derided; and apart from and before such instruction, the soul is its own pupil in the school of guilt, so that it is throughout weighed down by its capacity for producing ills.",
                "[296] “The mind of man,” says Moses, “is carefully intent upon wickedness from youth” (Gen. 8:21). The curse is heaviest on this “generation,” to use the figurative term for the literal “age,” in which the body is in its bloom and the soul inflated, when the smouldering passions are being fanned into a flame, consuming “threshing-floor and standing corn and fields” (Ex. 22:6) and whatever lies in their path.",
                "[297] This stricken generation or age must be tended on its sickbed by a third, taking the form of philosophy with its healing art, and put under the spell of sound and salutary reasonings. Through these it will be able to void the vast overload of sins and to fill its void, its starvation, its fearful emptiness of right actions.",
                "[298] So after this healing treatment there grows in the fourth generation within the soul power and vigour, because it has fully and firmly apprehended good sense and is immovably established in all virtues. This is what is meant by the saying “in the fourth generation they shall turn back hither.” For under that fourth number, to which he points, the soul turns back from sinning and is declared the heir of wisdom.",
                "[299] The first number is that under which it is impossible to form any conception of good or ill and the soul receives no impressions. Under the second we experience the onrush of sin. The third is that in which we receive the healing treatment, when we cast off the elements of sickness and the crisis of passion is reached and passed. The fourth is that in which we make good our claim to complete health and strength, when we feel that we are turning back from wickedness and laying our hands to the good. Till then we may not do so."
            ],
            [
                "[300] How that “until” is fixed he will himself shew us, when he says “for the iniquities of the Amorites are not yet fulfilled” (Gen. 15:16). Such words as these give weaker minds a handle for supposing that Moses represents fate and necessity as the cause of all events.",
                "[301] But we should recognize that while as a philosopher and interpreter of God he understood that causes have their sequence, connexion and interplay, he did not ascribe the causation of events to these subsidiary factors. He envisaged something else higher than and antecedent to these, a Someone who is borne on the universe like a charioteer or pilot. He steers the common bark of the world, in which all things sail; He guides that winged chariot, the whole heaven, exerting an absolute sovereignty which knows no authority but its own.",
                "[302] What then must be our explanation of these particular words? This.—The name Amorites is by interpretation “talkers.” Now speech is the greatest boon given by nature to mankind, but the gift has been marred by thousands of the recipients who have dealt ungratefully and faithlessly with the power which gave it. Such are impostors, flatterers, inventors of cunning plausibilities, who know well how to cheat and mislead, but that only, and have no thought for honest truth. And further, they practise a lack of clearness, which in speech is profound darkness, and darkness is the fellow-worker of thieves.",
                "[303] It is for this reason that Moses adorned the high priest with Manifestation and Truth (Ex. 28:26), judging that the speech of the man of worth should be transparent and true. But the speech which most aim at is obscure and false, and this is accepted by all the deluded multitude of common and unmeritable men.",
                "[304] So long then as “the sins of the Amorites,” that is of sophistical arguments, “are not fulfilled,” because they have not been refuted, but still in virtue of their powers of attraction seduce us with their plausibilities, while their enticements make us powerless to turn from and leave them, we remain where we are.",
                "[305] But if ever all the plausible fallacies are refuted by true beliefs, and thus the cup is filled to the brim and their sins appear in their true light, we shall run for our lives without a backward glance, or (shall we say?)slip our cable and sail clean away from the land of falsehood and sophistry, eager to find an anchorage in the most secure of all roadsteads, the haven of truth.",
                "[306] Such is the lesson expressed in the problem here presented. For it is impossible to turn back from, to hate, to leave the plausible falsehood, unless the sin involved in it be revealed complete and consummated. And this revelation will be made when, confronted by the firm evidence of truth, it receives the much-needed refutation."
            ],
            [
                "[307] He continues, “but when the sun was at its setting a flame arose” (Gen. 15:17). Thus he shews that virtue is a late birth and indeed, as some have said, established firmly only at the very close of life’s day. He likens virtue to a flame, for just as the flame consumes the fuel which lies at hand but gives light to the air in its neighbourhood, so virtue burns up the sins but fills the whole mind with its beam.",
                "[308] But while those unanalysed and unclassified ways of thinking, which he calls Amorites, govern us with their plausibilities, we cannot see the rays in their full unshadowed brightness. We are in the same plight as the furnace which has no clear fire, but to use his own word (Gen. 15:17) is “smoking.” The flickerings of knowledge are smouldering within us, but we cannot as yet bear the strengthening test of pure fire.",
                "[309] Yet great thanks are due to Him who sowed these flickering sparks, to the end that the mind should not be chilled by passion like dead bodies, but, warmed and heated by the glowing coals of virtue, be quickened into flame, till it finds its full conversion into sacred fire, like Nadab and Abihu (Lev. 10:2).",
                "[310] Now smoke comes before fire and forces those who approach it to shed tears. Both these, in the moral sphere, are a common experience. When we draw near to the forerunners of virtue we hope for its consummation, and if we cannot yet attain it our days are spent in sorrow and tears. For when some strong absorbing yearning has sunk into us, it urges us on to the quest of the desired object and forces us to be heavy of heart, until it is within our grasp.",
                "[311] Again in this passage he compares the soul of him who loves learning and hopes for its consummation to a furnace or oven, because each serves as a vessel wherein is prepared nourishing food, in the one case the food of corruptible meats, in the other that of incorruptible virtues.",
                "Again the torches of fire borne as in the mystic torch-rite are the judgements of God the torch-bearer, judgements bright and radiant, whose wont it is to range between the half-pieces, that is between the opposites of which the whole world is composed.",
                "[312] For we read “torches of fire which passed through between the half-pieces” (Gen. 15:17). Thus you may know how highly excellent is the work of the Potencies of God as they pass through the midst of material and immaterial things. They destroy nothing—for the half-pieces remain unharmed—but divide and distinguish the nature of each."
            ],
            [
                "[313] Rightly then is the Sage declared to be the heir of the knowledge of the truths here mentioned. For “on that day,” says Moses, “God made a covenant with Abraham, saying, “to thy seed will I give this land” (Gen. 15:18).",
                "[314] What land does he mean, but that which was mentioned before to which he now refers, the land whose fruit is the sure and stedfast apprehension of the wisdom of God, by which through His dividing powers He separates all things and keeps untouched by evil those that are good, as it is meet they should be kept for those who are born to life imperishable?",
                "[315] Then he continues, “from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates” (Gen. 15:18). Here he shews how it stands with the perfected. Their perfecting begins with the body and sense and the parts which serve as organs, without which we cannot live, since they are needed for our training while in the life of the body. It ends in the attainment of the wisdom of God, that truly great river, brimming over with joy and gladness and all other blessings.",
                "[316] For note that he does not fix the limits of the land as stretching from the river Euphrates to the river of Egypt—he would never have made virtue take a downward course into the bodily passions—but in the opposite order, from the river of Egypt to the great Euphrates. For all progress in good begins with the mortal and proceeds to the imperishable."
            ]
        ],
        "Appendix": [
            "APPENDIX TO QUIS RERUM DIVINARUM HERES",
            "§ 14. <i>A spherical shape. Cf</i>. Diog. Laert. vii. 158 ἀκούειν δὲ τοῦ μεταξὺ τοῦ τε φωνοῦντος καὶ τοῦ ἀκούοντος ἀέρος πληττομένου σφαιροειδῶς, εἶτα κυματουμένου καὶ ταῖς ἀκοαῖς προσπίπτοντος, ὡς κυματοῦται τὸ ἐν τῇ δεξαμένῃ ὕδωρ κατὰ κύκλους ὑπὸ τοῦ ἐμβληθέντος λίθου, “we hear when the air between the sonant body and the organ of hearing suffers concussion, a vibration which spreads spherically and then forms waves and strikes upon the ears, just as the water in a reservoir forms wavy circles when a stone is thrown into it” (Hicks’s translation). So too Plut. <i>Epit</i>. iv. 20 (Diels, <i>Dox</i>. p. 409), where contrasting the effect of the stone in the pool, he adds καὶ αὕτη μὲν (the pool) κυκλικῶς κινεῖται, ὁ δʼ ἀὴρ σφαιρικῶς.",
            "§ 17. <i>Tense of … completed action</i>. The Greek grammarians named the four tenses of past time (χρόνος παρεληλυθώς) as follows: imperfect, παρατατικός; aorist, ἀόριστος; perfect, παρακείμενος; pluperfect, ὑπερσυντελικός. The name συντελικός for the aorist. is sometimes, but rarely, found (see <i>Greek Gramm</i>. Part II. vol. iii. p. 85), but its use, perhaps to cover both aorist and perfect, is reflected in the name for the pluperfect and in the Latin term, <i>perfectum tempus</i>.",
            "§ 25. <i>Thou hast given me a tongue of instruction</i>, etc. The reference for this almost verbatim quotation from Isaiah is given by J. Cohn. It seems to have escaped previous editors.",
            "§ 29. ἀνεστοιχειωμένος. The word, which recurs in §§ 184 and 200, seems to mean “reduced to a single element”; <i>cf.</i> <i>De Vit. Mos.</i> ii. 288 ὃς αὐτὸν δυάδα ὄντα, σῶμα καὶ ψυχήν, εἰς μονάδος ἀνεστοιχείου φύσιν. L. &amp; S. “into its elements.”",
            "§ 36. ἔφεσιν (MSS. φύσιν). I have ventured on this correction because the MS. reading seems to me untranslatable. Mangey has “sinere ut naturae meae bonum intereat”; Yonge, “to be indifferent to the sight of my own nature separated from the good”; J. Cohn, “wenn mein Wesen untergehen und nicht mehr die Schönheit schauen würde.” I do not see how any of these can be got out of the Greek. Though not common, ἔφεσις in the sense of “desire” is sufficiently authenticated and, if right, was of course intended to echo ἐφίεμαι. At the same time, τὴν ἐμαυτοῦ φύσιν makes a good antithesis to γένος, and the corruption may lie in τοῦ καλοῦ (as I have alternatively suggested), or in καταλυθεῖσαν.",
            "§ 46. <i>And when the better life</i>, etc. The metaphor is not very clear. It would be made clearer (though at the expense of some awkwardness) if we take συνεπισπασθέν to agree with βάρος instead of with τοῦθʼ. In that case the meaning would be that when that part of the mixed which belongs to the better life preponderates in its side of the scales, the base life in the other scale is pulled up and kicks the beam.",
            "§ 52. <i>Gave the name</i>, etc. I do not see much sense in this expression, even if ὠνόμασεν can be taken (as by J. Cohn), as merely meaning “he described as.” I am inclined to think that the ἐκείνην of Pap. is right. Though grammatically superfluous after ἣν, so much so as to be almost ungrammatical, it may be partly accounted for by the desire to emphasize the antithesis to ἑαυτοῦ, and it gives a clear sense: “he gave to her who was his own death the name of Life.”",
            "§ 75. πάνθειον. It is curious that the Lexica have not noticed the occurrence of this word in Philo, here and in <i>De Aet.</i> 10. Otherwise, apart from definite notices of the Pantheon at Rome, the only example given is a passage in Aristotle quoted by a scholiast and referring to the Pantheon at Olympia.",
            "§ 76. As νοητῶν, added by the Papyrus after ἡμῶν, cannot be translated as it stands, I have not inserted it. It may be a mere slip induced by the νοητός above. Cohn suggested ἔξω γηίνων &lt;καὶ ἐφιέμενος&gt; νοητῶν. The phrase ὑπεξελθὼν ἐξ ἡμῶν for ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ is certainly strange, but may be modelled on the ὃς ἐξελεύσεται ἐκ σοῦ of the text.",
            "§ 81. ἀλλὰ σωμάτων &lt;καὶ&gt; τὰς ἐν τούτοις. Wendland’s text makes the ἐν τούτοις almost unintelligible, unless we may suppose that ταῦτα stands for the phenomenal world: <i>cf</i>. §280 and <i>De Ebr.</i> 132 (and note). The insertion of καί and change of punctuation removes the difficulty satisfactorily, though ἐν is hardly the preposition we should expect. Mangey’s suggestion of ἐν τόποις gets some support from <i>De Sac.</i> 68.",
            "§ 115. σπέρματα καὶ καταβολαί. It is hard to decide between this reading and Wendland’s (“Are the seed-droppings of the plants the works of agriculture or invisible works of invisible nature?”). My preference for the former chiefly rests on a feeling that while σπέρματα may well be thought of as nature’s work (<i>cf</i>. § 121), this cannot be said of the human agency expressed in καταβολαί.",
            "§ 132. <i>Where the object</i>, etc. For the difference between φαντασία καταληπτική and ἀκατάληπτος see Diog. Laert. vii. 46 τῆς δὲ φαντασίας τὴν μὲν καταληπτικήν, τὴν δὲ ἀκατάληπτον· καταληπτικὴν μὲν … τὴν γινομένην ἀπὸ ὑπάρχοντος κατʼ αὐτὸ τὸ ὑπάρχον ἐναπεσφραγισμένην καὶ ἐναπομεμαγμένην· ἀκατάληπτον δὲ τὴν μὴ ἀπὸ ὑπάρχοντος, ἢ ἀπὸ ὑπάρχοντος μέν, μὴ κατʼ αὐτὸ δὲ τὸ ὑπάρχον· τὴν μὴ τρανῆ μηδὲ ἔκτυπον, “there are two species of presentation, the one apprehending a real object, the other not. The former … is defined as that which proceeds from a real object, agrees with that object itself, and has been imprinted seal-fashion and stamped upon the mind; the latter, or non-apprehending, that which does not proceed from any real object, or, if it does, fails to agree with the reality itself, not being clear or distinct” (Hicks’s translation).",
            "§ 136. <i>Fire … heaven</i>. The doctrine of the two kinds of fire is Stoic. See <i>S.V.F.</i> i. 120 where the “useful” fire is called ἄτεχνον (non-creative?), and the other τεχνικόν. The best parallel to Philo’s language is in Cic. <i>De natura deorum</i>, ii. 40 from Cleanthes where of one he says, “ignis, quem usus vitae requirit, confector est et consumptor omnium idemque, quocumque invasit, cuncta disturbat ac dissipat”: of the other, “contra ille corporeus vitalis et salutaris omnia conservat, alit, auget, sustinet sensuque adficit.”",
            "§ 144. <i>Other things are equal in capacity</i>, etc. Wendland’s punctuation (a comma after μεγέθει) suggests that he understood the words as Mangey, Cohn, and Yonge all do, “cubit compared with cubit is equal in magnitude, but different in power” (Mangey “gravitate”). But this is hardly sense. It is quite easy to understand ἴσα from the preceding ἴσα μεγέθει, and we thus get the third form of equality, of which weights and measures of capacity are a natural example, and which is referred to again in § 151.",
            "§ 145. <i>One essential form is the proportional</i>, etc. Wendland refers to Aristot. <i>Pol</i>. viii. 1, p. 1301 b, where proportional equality is called λόγῳ or κατʼ ἀξίαν. But there is no need to suppose any definite reference. The idea of ἀναλογία runs through all Greek arithmetic.",
            "§ 156. <i>No heightening or lowering of intensity</i>. A Stoic phrase. The Stoics laid down that Virtue and the Good admitted neither of ἐπίτασις nor ἄνεσις (<i>S.V.F.</i> iii. 92), and in this differed from the τέχναι which did admit of such variations and gradations (<i>ibid</i>. 525). Thus Philo’s words are a way of saying that God’s art is like the Good and not like human art. For the antithesis of ἐπίτασις and ἄνεσις in a rather different sense <i>cf.</i> <i>Quod Deus</i> 162.",
            "§ 165. <i>The three which followed the sun’s creation</i>. This may no doubt mean that the fourth day, on which the sun was created, divided the first, second and third from the fifth, sixth and seventh. But the stress so constantly laid on the ἑξάς of creation, and equality (not the fourth day) being given as the divider, make it more probable that the three μεθʼ ἥλιον are the fourth, fifth and sixth. If so, it is strange that the fourth should be called “<i>after</i> the sun.” Should we read μεθʼ ἡλίου in both places?",
            "§ 169. <i>From his commonwealth</i>. Or “from his own commonwealth.” On a similar passage, <i>De Gig.</i> 59, I suggested that Philo was hinting at a comparison between the πολιτεία of Moses and that of Plato, which expelled some forms of poetry for the same reasons as are here given for expelling painting and sculpture, viz. their tendency to produce illusion and deception. No such reason, however, is given here, and further observation of Philo’s usage inclines me to think that his use of the reflexive pronoun in such phrases is not to be pressed.",
            "§ 170. &lt;οὐ τοῦ&gt; ὃ κτλ. That the negative has fallen out is evident. Mangey however proposed &lt;οὐχ&gt; ὅ, which is quite possible, though οὐ τοῦ ὅ is more strictly grammatical. If, as suggested in the footnote, we read, τοῦ κυρίου &lt;τοῦ θεοῦ&gt;, it would certainly be preferable to follow it by οὐχ ὅ. That Philo should have written six ου’s in succession is hardly credible.",
            "<i>Ibid. The number Seven</i>. The definite use by Philo of ἑβδομάς for the seventh day (ἑβδόμη) is certainly rare, but is difficult to avoid here, or in <i>De Vit. Mos</i>. i. 205. For the epithets applied to the ἑβδομάς <i>cf.</i> <i>De Op.</i> 100, and <i>Leg. All</i>. i. 15. In the first of them the idea is ascribed to philosophers other than the Pythagoreans, in the second to the Pythagoreans themselves.",
            "§ 182. <i>The high priest Moses</i>. As Moses in the history is not high priest, Mangey thought this should be corrected to ἀρχιπροφήτης. But Moses’ function here is that of high priest, and he is actually given the title in <i>De Vit. Mos</i>. ii. 75 and elsewhere.",
            "§ 185. νοῦ θείαις or νουθεσίαις. How is the latter to be translated? “Following the admonitions in its revolutions”? Mangey, who suggested and perhaps intended to translate προόδοις for περιόδοις, has “sequendo castigationis ductum”; Yonge, “following the guidance of admonition”; J. Cohn, “zu bestimmter Zeit den Mahnungen Folge leistet.” There is no suggestion that any of these adopted νουθεσίας, which is given by one MS. and would make the phrase more tolerable. I accept Wendland’s conjecture with confidence, and suggest that νοῦ περιόδοις is taken from <i>Timaeus</i> 47 B ἵνα τὰς ἐν οὐρανῷ κατιδόντες τοῦ νοῦ περιόδους χρησαίμεθα ἐπὶ τὰς περιφορὰς τὰς τῆς παρʼ ἡμῖν διανοήσεως, and again (<i>ibid</i>. D) ταῖς ἐν ἡμῖν τῆς ψυχῆς περιόδοις. We have already had the combination θείαις περιόδοις in § 88, where the general sense of the passage is in close agreement with <i>Timaeus</i> 47, and though there is less analogy between that and the context here, Philo’s love of the dialogue will account for his here introducing the phrase.",
            "§ 188. <i>Filling … being</i>. J. Cohn and Leisegang (<i>Index</i>) take this as “filled all existing things.” But is πάντα τῆς οὐσίας for πᾶσαν τὴν οὐσίαν Greek? On the other hand it seems doubtful whether ἐκπληροῦν is, like πληροῦν, followed by the genitive. Perhaps read πάντα &lt;τὰ&gt; τῆς οὐσίας.",
            "§ 190. <i>And therefore those who study such questions</i>, etc. <i>Cf</i>. Diog. Laert. viii. 25 of the Pythagorean tenets: ἀρχὴν μὲν ἁπάντων μονάδα· ἐκ δὲ τῆς μονάδος ἀόριστον δυάδα ὡς ἂν ὕλην τῇ μονάδι αἰτίῳ ὄντι ὑποστῆναι· ἐκ δὲ τῆς μονάδος καὶ τῆς ἀορίστου δυάδος τοὺς ἀριθμούς, “the principle of all things is the monad or unit; arising from this monad the undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad, which is cause; from the monad and the undefined dyad spring numbers” (Hicks’s translation).",
            "§ 212. ἀπέρατα or ἀπέραντα. If, as would appear from Liddell &amp; Scott (1927), the evidence for the existence of ἀπέρατος in the sense of “unlimited” depends mainly or entirely on Philo, it seems doubtful whether it is worth much. Two examples of ἀπέρατος are given in the index apart from this passage. In one of these ἀπέρατος φλόξ, <i>De Mig.</i> 100, the natural meaning is “impassable.” In the other, <i>De Fug.</i> 57, we have ἀπέρατος αἰών in all MSS. Here, as stated in the footnote, the MSS. are all for ἀπέραντα, though the Papyrus may be said to favour the other. Unless better evidence is forthcoming, there would seem to be good grounds for following the MSS. here, and correcting to ἀπέραντος, as Mangey wished, in <i>De Fug.</i> 57.",
            "§ 218. <i>Lamps … candle-bearers</i>. I do not vouch for the accuracy of the translation of these terms, which concern the study of the LXX rather than that of Philo. Mangey gives “cauliculi” for λαμπάδια (but also for καλαμίσκοι), and “lucernae” for λύχνοι. J. Cohn translates the two by “Kelche” and “Lampen.” When he gives “Kelche” (cups) he is presumably equating λαμπάδια with κρατῆρες in the parallel account of the chandelier in Ex. 25:31. The received text of the LXX has ἐνθέμια (sockets?) for ἀνθέμια.",
            "§ 228. <i>The general conflagration</i>. While the general sense of the section is made perfectly clear by the passages referred to in the footnote, there remain the following questions:",
            "(<i>a</i>) The position of the words ἀλλὰ … Μωυσῆν. Wendland was confident that these words had been written in the margin of the archetype and inserted in different places by different scribes, and omitted by others, and only at last placed in their right position by himself. This is probable enough, but is it quite certain that the Papyrus erred in placing them between σώματος and οὔτε ἰσομεγέθους, since in <i>De Aet.</i> 102 the void, as postulated by the Stoics, is said to be ἄπειρον (and so too <i>S.V.F.</i> ii. 536–540)? Is it impossible that Philo while quoting this should safeguard his statement by adding ἰσομεγέθους?",
            "(<i>b</i>) How did Moses disprove the void? Does Philo mean that since in <i>De Aet.</i> 19 Moses is said to have asserted the eternity of the world in Gen. 8:22, he thereby denied the ἐκπύρωσις, and consequently the void also? If so, the meaning of διά will differ somewhat from that given in the translation, <i>i.e</i>. “nor does the fable of the ἐκπύρωσις, if we follow Moses, justify us in postulating the existence of the void.”",
            "(<i>c</i>) The chief difficulty of the passage is that διά must be unnaturally strained to yield either meaning. I am inclined to think there is a corruption somewhere. I suggest, very tentatively of course, a lacuna after διά, <i>e.g</i>. δια&lt;φερόμενον τοῖς εἰσηγουμένοις&gt; τὴν ἐν τῇ κτλ.; <i>cf.</i> <i>De Mig.</i> 180.",
            "§ 242. σώμασιν οὐ πράγμασιν. I feel little doubt that Wendland was wrong in changing οὐ to καί. The balance of the sentence and the stress laid on σώματα throughout the passage, which is a meditation on τὰ σώματα τὰ διχοτομήματα of his text, in themselves support the MS. reading. Wendland may have taken πράγματα to be an interpretation of διχοτομήματα. But surely Philo’s interpretation of the word (an interpretation of course entirely opposed to that which he has given in the earlier chapters) is that “bodies cut in two” signify the lifelessness and incompleteness of material things. The question, however, must be decided by the other passages where σώματα and πράγματα are set in antithesis. These are as follows:",
            "(<i>a</i>) <i>De Mut.</i> 60 ἔνιοι μὲν οὖν τῶν … μώμους ἀεὶ τοῖς ἀμώμοις προσάπτειν ἐθελόντων οὐ σώμασι μᾶλλον ἢ πράγμασι. (The πράγματα attacked by these cavillers are the allegorical explanations of literal difficulties.)",
            "(<i>b</i>) <i>Ibid</i>. 173 Πεντεφρῆ τὸν … ἀρχιμάγειρον … ἐν ἀψύχοις καὶ νεκροῖς καλινδούμενον οὐ σώμασι μᾶλλον ἢ πράγμασι. <i>I.e</i>. the chief cook in the spiritual sense lives in an environment of dead ideas.",
            "(<i>c</i>) <i>De Som</i>. ii. 101 εὐξαίμην ἂν οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς δυνηθῆναι τοῖς γνωσθεῖσιν ὑπὸ τούτων ἐμμεῖναι βεβαίως· ὀπτῆρες γὰρ καὶ κατάσκοποι καὶ ἔφοροι πραγμάτων οὐ σωμάτων εἰσὶν ἀκριβοδίκαιοι. This is said of the sons of Jacob representing the wise, and rebuking the empty dreams of Joseph.",
            "In all these apparently πράγματα signifies things belonging to the mental world, ideas in fact, though they need not necessarily be good, as in (<i>b</i>), just as the νοῦς of Egypt is an evil mind. But the antithesis becomes clearer in",
            "(<i>d</i>) <i>Ibid</i>. 134 τὸν μὲν γὰρ φρονήσεως ἀσκητὴν ὑπολαμβάνομεν ἥλιον, ἐπειδήπερ ὁ μὲν τοῖς σώμασιν ὁ δὲ τοῖς κατὰ ψυχὴν πράγμασιν ἐμπαρέχει φῶς. Here πράγματα is definitely connected with νοητά as opposed to αἰσθητά, and the sense is exactly in agreement with our passage, as I understand it.",
            "§ 246. The different opinions mentioned in this section represent problems which Philo would constantly have heard disputed in contemporary discussions. In so far as they refer to the historic schools, we may say (1) that the creation of the universe was maintained by the Stoics and Epicureans and denied by the Peripatetics; (2) the words about the eternity of the universe and the reason given for it are almost a quotation from <i>Timaeus</i> 41 B, though there it is the “lesser gods,” not the universe, which are spoken of; (3) “becoming” and “being” may be assigned respectively to Heracleitus and the Eleatic school, but Philo was familiar with the antithesis in Plato, <i>e.g.</i> <i>Theaetetus</i> 152, where also (4) he found the famous saying of Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things.” He takes it in what may have been its original, though perhaps not the generally accepted, meaning, as opposed to the sceptical view that our mind and senses are untrustworthy, and so also in the other two places where he quotes it (<i>De Post.</i> 35 and <i>De Som</i>. ii. 193), though there it is its profanity as claiming for man what belongs only to God which is stressed. (5) “Those who maintain that everything is beyond our apprehension” are the sceptics, both those of the school of Pyrrho and the later Academy, while “those who assert that a great number of things are cognizable” are the non-sceptical philosophers in general, none of whom would assert more than that knowledge was generally, but not universally, attainable.",
            "§ 249. <i>Divine possession or frenzy</i>. Philo in this description of prophetic “ecstasy” evidently has in mind <i>Phaedrus</i> 244 E and 245 A in which the words κατοκωχή τε καὶ μανία occur (followed at once by the phrase ἁπαλὴν καὶ ἄβατον ψυχήν which he has already used in § 38). <i>Cf</i>. § 264.",
            "§ 253. <i>To treat things indifferent as indeed indifferent</i>. So in <i>Quod Det.</i> 122 it is the characteristic of justice ἐξαδιαφορεῖν τὰ μεθόρια κακίας καὶ ἀρετῆς, such as wealth, reputation and office, while on the other hand in <i>De Post.</i> 81, if Mangey’s emendation is accepted, the misuser of natural gifts ἐξαδιαφορεῖ τὰ διάφορα. The words ἐξαδιαφορεῖν and -ησις are not quoted from any other writer than Philo.",
            "<i>Ibid</i>. ἀπαρχάς is used here in a general sense, as there is no thought of offering to a god; <i>cf</i>. Dion. Hal. <i>De Comp</i>. iii. λόγων ἀπαρχάς, “specimen passages.”",
            "§ 274. <i>Or woman-man</i>. This addition is strange. In the other two places recorded, where Philo uses the word, it is as here coupled with ἀνδρόγυνος, but in contrast with it of a woman who adopts masculine dress or habits—an idea which is quite alien here. I suspect that it is an interpolation.",
            "<i>Ibid. Stock</i>. See General Introduction, vol. i. p. xvi, though the statement there requires some correction. The ἀποσκευή is not the Encyclia, but the whole fruits of παιδεία of which the Encyclia are the first stage.",
            "§ 282. The phraseology of the section is taken from <i>Timaeus</i> 42 E πυρὸς καὶ γῆς ὕδατός τε καὶ ἀέρος ἀπὸ τοῦ κόσμου δανειζόμενοι μόρια, ὡς ἀποδοθησόμενα πάλιν.",
            "§ 283. <i>Moving in a circle. Cf</i>. Aristot. <i>De Caelo</i>, i. 2 and 3, where it is laid down that while the four elements have a rectilineal, the ether or fifth element has a circular movement. So also Philo of the heaven in <i>De Somn</i>. i. 21. See also <i>Quod Deus</i> 46 and note.",
            "§ 290. <i>In the shadow of death</i>. The LXX actually has (like the Hebrew) ἐπὶ σκηνώμασι ἁμαρτωλῶν. This curious slip of memory was no doubt partly due to the sound σκ in both phrases.",
            "§ 291. πολύν. This reading of Wendland’s, based on the πολύ of Pap., does not seem to me satisfactory. Wendland himself, while noting the πολιόν of G, says “fortasse recte.” Yet “grey-haired vanity” also seems strange. I should prefer to read πολιῶν (fem.) or πολιᾶς, both well-known terms for old age.",
            "§ 310. τοῖς … ἀγγέλοις. While I retain and translate this, I do not think it satisfactory. The use of ἄγγελος is strange and only distantly paralleled by <i>De Mut.</i> 162 αὐγὴ γὰρ αὐγῆς ἄγγελος. But though Wendland accepted Mangey’s ταῖς … αὐγαῖς as certain, it seems to me even less satisfactory, at any rate when coupled with Wendland’s προσχωροῦντες or Mangey’s ἐγχορεύοντες. There is no great likeness of form, and the sense is poor. The clause evidently interprets κάπνος γίνεται πρὸ πυρός. At this stage there are no “rays,” and while “hope” may fairly stand for “smoke,” to say “when we approach the rays we hope,” is a poor equivalent to “smoke comes before fire,” and Mangey’s “as we move amid the rays we hope” is none at all. It would, however, be much improved if we read πρὼ (πρωὶ) ἐγχορεύοντες, <i>i.e</i>. “in our <i>first</i> stage of experiencing the rays, we hope” (and nothing more).",
            "Perhaps we might bring it still nearer to the MSS. by putting ἁγγείοις for ἀγγέλοις. The oven or furnace is actually called an ἀγγεῖον ἀρετῆς a few lines below, and though there, as well as in § 308, we are the furnace, not in it, such a variation of the figure is not impossible. After all it is not really the furnace which smokes, but the fuel in it, and if we read τοῖς τε γὰρ ἀρετῆς ἀγγείοις πρὼ (πρωὶ) ἐγχορεύοντες τελειότητα ἐλπίζομεν, we have a text almost identical with that of the MSS. and Pap., and giving a sense intelligible in itself (though not in complete agreement with its environment), that “when we are in the early stage of playing the part of fuel in the furnaces in which virtue is produced, we emit only the smoke of hoping for the full flame.” (This general use of χορεύω and ἐγχορεύω is common enough in Philo, see <i>e.g.</i> <i>De Fug.</i> 45 ὁ ἔτι χορεύων ἐν τῷ θνητῷ βίῳ.)",
            "§ 314. καθʼ ἣν … ἀφθάρτοις. The text suggested in the footnote, which might be varied by &lt;διακρίνας&gt; διαφυλάττει for δια&lt;κρίνας&gt; φυλάττει, and κατὰ τὰ ἅ for καθά, is fairly near to the MSS. and seems to me to give a satisfactory sense. Mangey strangely accepted Markland’s feeble suggestion of τοῖς τιμῶσιν αὐτόν for τοῖς τομεῦσιν ἑαυτοῦ.",
            "<i>Ibid. Who are born to life imperishable</i>. With the change of ἐπί to πρέπει (or perhaps to ἔδει), these words present no difficulty. I understand them to be an interpretation, which in fact is needed, of τῷ σπέρματί σου. That the “seed of Abraham” should be called “those who in their origin are incorruptible” is natural enough."
        ]
    },
    "versions": [
        [
            "Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1932",
            "https://www.nli.org.il/en/books/NNL_ALEPH001216057/NLI"
        ]
    ],
    "heTitle": "מי יורש קנייני אלוה",
    "categories": [
        "Second Temple",
        "Philo"
    ],
    "schema": {
        "heTitle": "מי יורש קנייני אלוה",
        "enTitle": "Who is the Heir of Divine Things",
        "key": "Who is the Heir of Divine Things",
        "nodes": [
            {
                "heTitle": "הקדמה",
                "enTitle": "Introduction"
            },
            {
                "heTitle": "",
                "enTitle": ""
            },
            {
                "heTitle": "הערות",
                "enTitle": "Appendix"
            }
        ]
    }
}