inally, wearied by man's wickedness,
determining upon his destruction, nevertheless.

45. Others understand this of the created spirit: My spirit that I
breathed upon the face of man, that is the spirit of man, shall no
longer strive and contend with the flesh, which is in subjection to
its lusts, for I shall take away this spirit and free it from the
flesh, so that when the latter has become extinct, it may create no
more difficulties for the spirit. This is the understanding of Origen,
and it does not differ much from the Manichean error which attributes
sin not to the whole man, but only to a part. And Augustine says that
this had pleased him most in the tenets of the Manicheans, to hear
that his depravity was not altogether his, but only of that part of
the body which is evil from the beginning. The Manicheans posited two
principles, the good and the bad, just as certain philosophers have
posited enmity and friendship. Thus do men not only miss the mark, but
they also fall into ungodly delusions.

46. Rabbi David cites Sanctes, and derives the word _jadon_ from
_nadan_, which means sheath, or shell. But as the interpretation is
very clumsy, so he clothes it also in a very clumsy word: My Spirit
shall not be inclosed in man as in a sheath. Has anything more
unnatural ever been heard? But the Jews make a laughing-stock of
modern Hebraists when they convince them that the Holy Scriptures can
not be understood except through grammatical rules and an exact
science of vowel-points. No exposition is so absurd but that they
defend and polish it with their stale grammatical rules.

47. But tell me, what language has there ever been that men easily
have learned to speak from grammatical rules? Is it not true that the
very languages most thoroughly reduced to rules, like Greek and Latin,
are learned rather by practice? What stupendous absurdity, therefore,
it is to gather the sense of a sacred tongue, which is the repository
of things theological and spiritual, from grammatical rules, and to
pay no attention to the proper signification of things? And this is
what the rabbis and their disciples do almost universally. Many words
and verbs may be declined for which no use is seen in the language.
While they make such things paramount and everywhere chase anxiously
after etymology, they fall into strange fancies.

48. So here. Because the word in this passage can be derived from
_nadan_, they construct from that a prodigious m