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Part Two · Chapter Forty — Law and Governance: Prophet versus Mere Lawgiver
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It has been most clearly explained that man is social by nature, and that it is his nature to live in community — he is not like the other animals for whom community is not a necessity. Because of the great compositeness of this species — for it is the most compound, as you know — there is great difference among its individuals to the point that you will barely find two persons agreeing in any kind of character, whereas you may find their outward form is similar. The cause of this is the difference of temperament, which causes matter to differ, which also causes the accidents that follow from the form to differ — for every natural form has its own specific accidents besides those that follow from matter. Such enormous individual variation does not exist in any other animal species; the variation among individuals of each species is close, except in man — you find two of us as if from two species in every character, to the point that you find the hardness of one person reaching the point that he would slaughter his young child in extreme anger, while another has pity on killing a louse or any insect and his soul trembles for it. The same is true for most accidents.
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Since his nature requires that there be this variation among his individuals, and his nature necessarily requires community, community can only be accomplished through a governing authority that regulates their actions, supplements what is deficient, curtails what is excessive, and establishes actions and character traits that they all perform on one consistent course always — until the natural variation is hidden within the uniformity of the conventional agreement, and the community becomes ordered.
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For this reason I say: even though the Law is not natural, it has a role in the natural order. So among God's wisdom for the persistence of this species — as He willed its existence — was that He placed in its nature the capacity of its individuals for governance. Some of them may themselves inspire that governance: such is the prophet or the lawgiver of a political code. Others may have the power to compel performance of what someone else has laid down and follow it and bring it into effect: such are the ruler who adopts that political code, and the person claiming prophecy who adopts the genuine prophet's law — either all of it or some of it; taking some and leaving some is either because that was easier for him, or to create the impression that these matters came to him by revelation and that he was not following someone else — out of jealousy. For there are people who admire some perfection, delight in it, desire it, and want others to imagine they possess it, even though they know they do not — just as you see many who claim others' poetry as their own, and the same happens with some works of scholars and discoveries in many fields: a jealous, lazy person sees something another invented and claims he invented it. The same happened with this prophetic perfection: we find people who claimed prophecy and stated things that no revelation had ever brought from God — like Zedekiah son of Chenaanah. And we find people who claimed prophecy and stated things that God undoubtedly did say — meaning they had come by revelation, but to someone else — like Hananiah son of Azzur, who stole them and adorned themselves with them.
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Knowing all this and distinguishing among it is very important, and I will explain it to you so that the matter will not be confused for you. You will then have a distinction by which to discriminate between the guidance of political codes, the guidance of the divine Law, and the guidance of someone who took things from the sayings of the prophets and claimed and stole them. As for codes whose authors explicitly stated that they are political codes composed from their own reasoning — no evidence is needed for that when the defendant confesses, for a confession needs no proof. What I want to teach you is how to discriminate among the arrangements claimed to be prophetic, some of which are genuinely prophetic — meaning divine — and some political, and some plagiarized.
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When you find a law whose entire aim and purpose — and the entire intention of its author who regulated its actions — is nothing but the ordering of the city and its conditions, and the removal of injustice and domination from it, and it contains no reference whatsoever to theoretical matters and no attention to the perfection of the rational faculty, and does not care whether its opinions are sound or unsound — but its entire aim is the ordering of people's relations with one another by whatever means, so that they may attain some presumed happiness according to that leader's view — then know that this law is political, and its author belongs, as we said, to the third class: those who are perfect in the imaginative faculty only.
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When you find a law all of whose arrangements look to both the preceding welfare of bodily conditions and to the welfare of belief as well — and its sole concern is to give first correct opinions about God, exalted be He, and about the angels, and it aims at instructing, explaining, and awakening the person until he knows all of existence in the form of truth — then know that this governance is from God, exalted be He, and that this is a divine Law.
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What remains to know is: is the person claiming this the perfect person to whom it was revealed, or is he someone who claimed those utterances and stole them? The way to test this is to assess the perfection of that person, track his actions, and reflect on his conduct — and the greatest indicator is the rejection and contempt of bodily pleasures, for this is the first degree of scholars, let alone prophets — especially the sense of touch which is a disgrace to us as Aristotle mentioned, particularly its aspect of sexual intercourse. This is why God has exposed every false claimant through this, so that the truth becomes clear to careful inquirers and they do not go astray. Consider how Zedekiah son of Maasiah and Ahab son of Kolaiah claimed prophecy and people followed them; they brought utterances that had come by genuine revelation to others, but they were immersed in the baseness of sexual pleasure to the point that they committed adultery with the wives of their companions and followers — until God exposed them as He exposed other false prophets, and the king of Babylon burned them, as Jeremiah stated: 'And of them shall be taken up a curse by all the captivity of Judah that are in Babylon, saying: The Lord make you like Zedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in fire; because they committed villainy in Israel, and committed adultery with their neighbors' wives, and spoke lying words in My name, which I commanded them not; and I am the witness, says the Lord' (Jer. 29:22-23). Grasp this point.