  While the entire Bible is, for Saadya, revealed (particularly as an auditory prophecy-to-Moses which is then reported to — and hence, received as tradition by — future generations), Saadya's focus on the “laws of revelation” demarcates not all of the revealed Bible, and not even all of the laws found in the revealed Bible, but rather, only a subsection of those laws. To better understand what the “laws of revelation” refer to, consider again the contrast class, viz. the “laws of reason” (which are of course also found in the revealed Bible). As mentioned above, this distinction between 2 classes of Biblical laws is already alluded to in rabbinic literature (cf. Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 67b); Saadya, though, is seen as the first Jewish writer to really engage this discussion philosophically. Saadya addresses this distinction in the third chapter of his Amânât (a chapter devoted to an investigation of “commandment and prohibition”). The “laws of reason” (again, the ones described as “ ‘aqliyyât ” from the root “intellect”) are essentially characterized there as commandments and prohibitions in the Bible whose reasons could be arrived at independently by any rational human being. In other words, these are laws which ought to ‘make sense’ to any reasonable person, and, as such, are basic (one might say, natural) moral laws which, left to our own devices, we ought come up with on our own. Examples of such laws are the prohibitions against murder, adultery, theft, and lying. The “laws of reason” are described by Saadya as legislating over matters that, as Saadya says, God “has implanted approval [or, in cases of prohibition, disapproval] of…in our reason” (Altmann, 97). The “laws of revelation” (sam‘iyyât, again, from the root sami‘a, ‘to hear’) are described on the contrary as follows: