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Part One · Chapter Seven — Yalad
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Yalad. The meaning understood from this word is well known — namely, bearing offspring: 'and they bore him children' (Deut 21:15).
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Then this term was borrowed for the coming-to-be of natural things: 'before the mountains were brought forth' (Ps 90:2).
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And it was also borrowed for the sense of the earth's making-grow what it makes grow, likening it to birth: 'and made it bring forth and sprout' (Isa 55:10).
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And it was also borrowed for the events of time, as though they were things born: 'for you know not what a day may bring forth' (Prov 27:1).
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And it was also borrowed for the products of thought and the opinions and doctrines they give rise to, as it says, 'and brings forth falsehood' (Ps 7:15).
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And of this it is said, 'and in the children of strangers they please themselves' (Isa 2:6) — they content themselves with their opinions, as Jonathan ben Uzziel, peace be upon him, said in explaining it: 'and in the customs of the gentiles they walk.'
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On this meaning, whoever taught a person some matter and imparted to him an opinion, it is as though he begot that person insofar as he holds that opinion. And in this sense the disciples of the prophets were called 'the sons of the prophets,' as we shall explain under the equivocal senses of the noun ben.
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And by this borrowing it was said of Adam, 'and Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begot in his own likeness, after his image' (Gen 5:3).
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The meaning of Adam's image and likeness has already been given to you. The children who came before him had not attained the truly human form — which is Adam's image and likeness, of which it is said, 'in the image of God and after His likeness.'
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But Seth — once [Adam] had taught and instructed him, and the human perfection was complete in him — of him it was said, 'and begot in his own likeness, after his image.'
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And you already know that anyone in whom this form has not come to be — the form whose meaning we have explained — is no man, but an animal in the shape and outline of a man.
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Yet he has a power for kinds of harm and the working of evils such as no other animal has, since the thought and reflection that were given him as a preparation for attaining the perfection he did not attain, he turns instead to kinds of cunning that produce evils and beget injuries — so that he is a thing resembling man, or aping him.
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And such were the children of Adam who came before Seth; and they said in the Midrash, 'all those hundred and thirty years that Adam was under censure, he begot spirits' — meaning demons.
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But once He was pleased with him, he begot one like himself — that is, 'in his likeness, after his image' — and that is its saying, 'and Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begot in his own likeness, after his image.'