3. I was deeply disturbed, and I began to speak reverently to the Most High:
4. “Supreme Lord, didn’t you speak in the beginning, when you fashioned the earth, and did this alone? Didn’t you command the earth,
5. and it gave you Adam, a lifeless body? But it was the work of your hands, and so you breathed into him the breath of life, and he came to life in your presence.
6. You led him into paradise, which your strong hand had planted before earth came to be.
7. You gave him one command, and he disobeyed it, and so you immediately appointed death for him and for his descendants. Nations, tribes, peoples, and families without number were born from him.
8. Each nation lived by its own will, and people acted without giving you a thought. They acted with scorn, and you didn’t prevent them.
9. But again, in time you brought the flood over the world and upon those who live in it and destroyed them.
10. Their fate was all the same: as death came upon Adam so the flood came upon them.
11. But you left one of them, Noah, with his household, and all the righteous descended from him.
12. “When those who lived on earth began to multiply (and multiply they did—children, peoples, and many nations), they began again to act wickedly, even more so than the previous ones.
13. When they committed iniquity before you, you chose one from among them whose name was Abraham.
14. You loved him and showed him alone the end of times, secretly by night.
15. You made an eternal covenant with him, and you told him that you would never abandon his family line. You gave him Isaac, and you gave Jacob and Esau to Isaac.
16. You set Jacob apart for yourself, but you set Esau aside, and Jacob became a great multitude.
17. When you brought his descendants out of Egypt, you led them to Mount Sinai.
18. You bent down the heavens; you shook the earth; you moved the world; you made the abyss tremble; you made the whole cosmos shudder.
19. Your glory passed through the four gates of fire, earthquake, wind, and ice so that you would give the Law to Jacob’s descendants, the rules to be observed to Israel’s offspring.
20. “But you didn’t take away from them the inclination to do evil so that your Law might bear fruit in them.