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to be prepared for everything; since, if this were not so, all things would have perished, neither the farmer, nor the sailor, the one knowing to cut up the earth, the other the sea, at the proper season. This knowledge of these seasons is not only suitable and most useful for humans, but also for irrational creatures. Concerning the luminaries it is also said in Genesis: Let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years; for signs 23.1281 on the one hand, of rainfalls, droughts, movements of winds; and for seasons, the changes of the airs, of winter, spring, summer, autumn; which the ordered movement of the luminaries allows us to cycle through in an orderly manner; and for days, not so as to make days; for day and night are older than the creation of the luminaries; but so as to rule over the days; and for years, because the moon, when it has completed its own course twelve times, is productive of a year; and a solar year is the return of the sun from the same point to the same point. The sun knew its setting. You appointed darkness, and it became night; in it all the beasts of the forest will roam. Young lions roaring to seize prey, and to seek their food from God. The sun arose, and they will be gathered together, and they will lie down in their dens. Man will go forth to his work, and to his labor until evening. How magnified are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is filled with your creation. The sun knew its setting, that is, that which was ordained for it by a superior. For the sun learned only to give light; Not always and forever, but to rule the day, and also at night to yield to the stars that appear in it to complete their own course; so that when night has come, and darkness has spread over the earth, the tame animals may withdraw and depart, and as many as are wild beasts, these may come to their own food; for in their own time fitting for them, in the interval of the night. Young lions roaring to seize prey, and to seek their food from God; because for them also the earth has not brought forth grass as for the cattle, and green herb for the service of men. God, as the guardian of all things, and bringing forth providence for the continuation and life of all things, arranged for some to be driven away by the rays of the sun, and to flee the light as an enemy; and for others, as kin to the light, he permitted to go forth in the day, and to spend their life in the light; with the beasts lying down in their dens, and the rational creature going forth in the day and light to its work and to its labor until evening. This sea, great and wide, there are creeping things without number; small animals with great. In these things he shows that, just as the element of the earth is generative and nutritive of many animals, in the same way the moist substance also nourishes very many kinds of animals. For God did not make the spaces empty, but filled all things with animals: the air, the earth, the sea; the one only with birds, the other with quadrupeds and winged creatures, and the other with countless fish; of which some are greater, others smaller, and the smaller are food for the greater, and the species is not used up. And this too is a proof of divine guardianship, that the small species cohabit with the large, 23.1284 and are not completely consumed by them; for the more powerful feed on the weaker, and have not consumed them, but the income overcomes the expense. Those among humans who devour the weaker are like these. But in that case what happens is not a crime; for what occurs is of nature; but you will have not one defense, who are honored with reason and law and yet lead yourself to the confusion of the irrational creatures. Indeed he calls the fish "creeping things," because being footless they, as it were, trail along in the water, as reptiles do on the earth.