 Unlike the king, the sage is by no means prepared to jettison reason and speculation altogether, even and perhaps especially in defense of his faith. Thus, he invokes God's name in an informal oath, once again, to forbid the acceptance of anything that the intellect regards as absurd or impossible, which in the case at hand would clearly apply to construing God as corporeal. While his oath is surely no syllogistic argument, it is a performative utterance to be taken with the utmost seriousness, especially when the strictures against taking God's name in vain are recalled. By speaking in this manner, the sage acknowledges the supremacy of the divine order in all of its senses, but he does this now in defense of reason and rationality. Since oaths are taken, in part, to establish truth in an inquiry, his purpose in taking this oath is evidently to base all inquiries in pursuit of the truth on the authority of the Law and respect for its foundations. He illustrates the point by noting that the first of the Ten Commandments mandates the acceptance of God's sovereignty, and his oath assuredly does this. The second Commandment, in turn, forbids representing God corporeally in any form. If so, it would be utterly absurd for the Law to presuppose what it prohibits (i.e., that God must be corporeal), given what the Bible relates about the great theophany.