ON ABRAHAM, THAT IS, THE LIFE OF THE WISE MAN MADE PERFECT THROUGH TEACHING, OR THE FIRST BOOK ON UNWRITTEN LAWS
[1] The first of the five books in which the holy laws are written bears the name and inscription of Genesis, from the genesis or creation of the world, an account of which it contains at its beginning. It has received this title in spite of its embracing numberless other matters; for it tells of peace and war, of fruitfulness and barrenness, of dearth and plenty; how fire and water wrought great destruction of what is on earth; how on the other hand plants and animals were born and throve through the kindly tempering of the air and the yearly seasons, and so too men, some of whom lived a life of virtue, others of vice.
[2] But since some of these things are parts of the world, and others events which befall it, and the world is the complete consummation which contains them all, he dedicated the whole book to it.
The story of the order in which the world was made has been set forth in detail by us as well as was possible in the preceding treatise ;
[3] but, since it is necessary to carry out our examination of the law in regular sequence, let us postpone consideration of particular laws, which are, so to speak, copies, and examine first those which are more general and may be called the originals of those copies.
[4] These are such men as lived good and blameless lives, whose virtues stand permanently recorded in the most holy scriptures, not merely to sound their praises but for the instruction of the reader and as an inducement to him to aspire to the same;
[5] for in these men we have laws endowed with life and reason, and Moses extolled them for two reasons. First he wished to shew that the enacted ordinances are not inconsistent with nature; and secondly that those who wish to live in accordance with the laws as they stand have no difficult task, seeing that the first generations before any at all of the particular statutes was set in writing followed the unwritten law with perfect ease, so that one might properly say that the enacted laws are nothing else than memorials of the life of the ancients, preserving to a later generation their actual words and deeds.
[6] For they were not scholars or pupils of others, nor did they learn under teachers what was right to say or do: they listened to no voice or instruction but their own: they gladly accepted conformity with nature, holding that nature itself was, as indeed it is, the most venerable of statutes, and thus their whole life was one of happy obedience to law. They committed no guilty action of their own free will or purpose, and where chance led them wrong they besought God’s mercy and propitiated Him with prayers and supplications, and thus secured a perfect life guided aright in both fields, both in their premeditated actions and in such as were not of freely-willed purpose.