AND he answered and said unto me: Wherefore at that time he appointed for them a covenant and said: Behold I have placed before you life and death, and he called heaven and earth to witness against them.
For he knew that his time was but short, but that heaven and earth endure always.
But after his death they sinned and transgressed, though they knew that they had the Torah reproving them, and the light in which nothing could err, also the spheres which testify, and me.
Now regarding everything that is, it is I that judge, but do not take counsel in your soul regarding these things, nor afflict yourself because of those which have been.
For now it is the consummation of time that should be considered, whether of business, or of prosperity, or of shame, and not the beginning thereof.
Because if a man be prospered in his beginnings and shamefully intreated in his old age, he forgets all the prosperity that he had.
And again, if a man is shamefully intreated in his beginnings, and at his end is prospered, he remembers not again his evil intreatment. And again hearken: though each one were prospered all that time. All the time from the day on which death was decreed against those who transgress, and in his end was destroyed, in vain would have been everything.