Литература Второго Храма к Дварим 23:1

[69] Now just as the creature with many feet and that without feet, opposite species in the genus of creeping things, are proclaimed unclean, so also atheism and polytheism, mutually antagonistic doctrines in the soul, are alike profane. Here is the indication of this: the Law has expelled both of these doctrines from the sacred assembly, atheism, by debarring a eunuch from membership of it; polytheism, by likewise forbidding the son of a harlot to be a listener or speaker in it (Deut. 23:1 f.). For the sterile man is godless; and the son of a whore is a polytheist, being in the dark about his real father, and for this reason ascribing his begetting to many, instead of to one.

[111] But there is a different mind which loves the body and the passions and has been sold in slavery to that chief cateress (Gen. 39:1) of our compound nature, Pleasure. Eunuch-like it has been deprived of all the male and productive organs of the soul, and lives in indigence of noble practices, unable to receive the divine message, debarred from the holy congregation (Deut. 23:1) in which the talk and study is always of virtue. When this mind is cast into the prison of the passions, it finds in the eyes of the chief jailer a favour and grace, which is more inglorious than dishonour.

[184] Thus I, the servant of that Pharaoh who keeps his stubborn incontinent thinking in an intensity of looseness, am an eunuch (Gen. 40:7), gelded of the soul’s generating organs, a vagrant from the men’s quarters, an exile from the women’s, a thing neither male nor female, unable either to shed or receive seed, twofold yet neuter, base counterfeit of the human coin, cut off from the immortality which, through the succession of children and children’s children, is kept alight for ever, roped off from the holy assembly and congregation. “For he that hath lost the organs of generation is absolutely forbidden to enter therein” (Deut. 23:1).