Chapter IV. On the Ethical Doctrines of the Hebrews

As to Ethics then, if you thoroughly examine what the Hebrews taught, you will find that this subject before all others was zealously studied among them in deeds much earlier than in words. Since as the end of all good, and the final term of a happy life, they both admired and pursued religion and that friendship with God which is secured by the right direction of moral habits; but not bodily pleasure, like Epicurus; nor again the threefold kinds of good, according to Aristotle, who esteems the good of the body, and external good on an equality with the good of the soul; no, nor yet the utter void of knowledge and instruction, which some have announced by a more respectable name as ‘suspension of judgement’; nay, nor even the virtue of the soul; for how much is there of this in men, and what can it contribute by itself without God to the life that knows no sorrow?

For the sake of that life they fastened their all on hope in God, as a cable that could not break, and declared that the friend of God was the only happy man: because God the dispenser of all good, the purveyor of life and fountain of virtue itself, being the provider of all good things for the body, and of outward fortune, must be alone sufficient for the happy life to the man who by thoroughly true religion has secured His friendship.

Hence Moses, the wisest of men and the first of all to commit to writing the life of the godly Hebrews before his time, has described in an historical narrative their mode of life both political and practical. In beginning that narrative he drew his teaching from universal principles, assuming God as the cause of the universe, and describing the creation of the world and of man.

Thus from universal principles he next advanced in his argument to particulars, and by the memory of the men of old urged his disciples on to emulation of their virtue and piety; and moreover being himself declared the author of the holy laws enacted by him, it must be manifest that on all points he was careful to promote the love of God by his attention to moral habits, a point which in fact our argument anticipated and made clear in what has gone before.

It would be too long to set down in this place the prophets who came in succession after Moses, and their arguments to encourage virtue, and dissuade from all kinds of vice. But what if I were to bring before you the moral precepts of the all-wise Solomon, to which he devoted a special treatise and called it a book of Proverbs,including in one subject many concise judgements of the nature of apophthegms?

And in this way from old times, before the Greeks had learned even the first letters, the Hebrews were both themselves instructed in the ethical branch, and freely imparted of the same instruction to those who came to them.