531. The following comparisons may serve to illustrate this. Before repentance a person is like a desert which is the home of terrifying wild animals, dragons, horned owls, tawny owls, vipers and haemorrhoids*, with thickets inhabited by ochim and tziim** where satyrs dance. When these creatures have been expelled by human labour and toil, the desert can be ploughed up and be brought into cultivation, the fields being planted first with oats, beans and flax, and later with barley and wheat.
Another comparison might be made with the wrong-doing which is so plentiful that it dominates human life; if wrong-doers were not chastised according to the law and punished by beatings or execution, no city, and equally no kingdom, could hold together. A person is like a small-scale community; if he were not to deal with himself in a spiritual fashion as wrong-doers are dealt with in a natural fashion in a large community, after death he would be chastised and punished, and this would continue until he desisted from evil for fear of punishment, though he could never be brought to do good for the love of good.
* A fabulous snake believed to cause haemorrhage. ** Hebrew words perhaps meaning 'howling creatures,' used, e.g., in Isa. 34:14, Jer. 50:9, understood by the author as birds (CL 264.4).
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