Numbers 21:17

"Initiate the well for it," it says. This is the sense: set, it says, the well as the beginning of all things, just as the Apostle also says that "he is the beginning, and the firstborn of every creature, and in him all things were created." Initiate the well for it, therefore — that is, confess the well to be the beginning of all things. But it can also be understood in this way, that the words seem to be directed from the person of Moses, exhorting the people and saying: Give a beginning to your heart, that it may begin to understand what the well is, from which the spiritual waters are to be drawn and by which the people of believers is to be refreshed. Initiate this well, therefore, for it, that is, for Israel, so that whoever sees God with the heart may be able to draw the mystical sense from the depths. That Moses, that is the Law, should gather us to this well does not seem to be said in vain. For it can happen that someone may seem to come to this well, but unless he is gathered through Moses, he is not accepted by God. Marcion seems to himself to have come to this well, and Basilides and Valentinus, but because they did not come through Moses nor receive the Law and the prophets, they cannot praise the Lord God from the fountains of Israel. Therefore those who are of this kind do not come to the well which the princes dug and the kings hewed out. But do you wish me to show you from the Scriptures to what wells these men come? There is a certain salt valley, in which valley are wells of bitumen; every heresy therefore and every sin is in a valley, and in a salt valley. For sin and iniquity does not ascend upward, but always descends to the lowest and infernal places. Every heretical understanding, therefore, and every act of sin is both set in a valley and salt and bitter. For what sweet, what pleasant thing can sin have? But it has something even more. For if you come to a heretical opinion, if you come to the bitterness of sin, you have come to the wells of bitumen. Bitumen is food and nourishment for fire. If therefore you too taste water from these wells, if you take up a heretical understanding, if you receive the bitterness of sin, you will prepare within yourself the kindling of fire and the burnings of Gehenna. And therefore to those who are unwilling to drink water from that well which the princes dig and the kings, but from these which are…