What the Letter Cannot Say

And if we come to the legislation of Moses, many of the laws show that they make no sense when they are kept just as they stand, and others that they cannot be kept at all. Take the ones that make no sense. The people are forbidden to eat vultures — though nobody, even in the worst famines, was ever driven by hunger to resort to that bird. And uncircumcised babies eight days old are ordered to be wiped out from among their people, when, if anything at all had to be laid down about them literally, the order should have been to put their fathers to death, or the people bringing them up. But as it is, the Scripture says: “Every uncircumcised male who is not circumcised on the eighth day shall be cut off from his people.” [a]

And if you want to see things laid down by law that cannot be done, look at this. The goat-stag is one of the animals that cannot exist, and Moses tells us to eat it as a clean animal; while the griffin, which is nowhere recorded to have been mastered by a man, the lawgiver forbids us to eat. Then there is the famous sabbath command: “You shall sit, each of you, in your own houses; none of you is to leave his place on the seventh day.” Anyone who looks at it closely will find it impossible to keep as it stands, since no living creature can sit through a whole day and never move from sitting.

So those who belong to the circumcision, and everyone who wants nothing more than the wording to be meant, do not so much as look into questions like the goat-stag and the griffin and the vulture. On other points they talk nonsense, inventing arguments and bringing in flat, lifeless traditions — as they do about the sabbath, saying that each man’s limit is three thousand feet. Others, among them Dositheus the Samaritan, condemn that reading and think that whatever position a man is caught in on the sabbath day, he has to stay in it until evening. And the rule about not lifting a load on the sabbath day cannot be kept either, so the Jewish teachers have gone off into endless talk about it, saying that this kind of shoe is a load and that kind is not, that a sandal with nails in it is a load and one without them is not, and in the same way that a thing carried on one shoulder is a load but not a thing carried on both.

And if we go to the gospel and look into it the same way, what could make less sense than taking literally “Greet no one on the road” — which simple people think the Savior was ordering the apostles to do? The saying about the right cheek being struck is also most unlikely, since everyone who strikes, unless there is something about him contrary to nature, strikes the left cheek with his right hand. And it is impossible to take, from the gospel, a right eye that makes a man stumble. Grant that someone can be made to stumble by the sense of sight: when there are two eyes that see, how is the blame to be laid on the right one? And who, condemning himself for having looked at a woman to crave her, could reasonably lay the blame on the right eye alone and throw that eye away? [g]

The apostle, too, lays down a rule: “Was anyone called after he was circumcised? He is not to draw the foreskin forward.” In the first place, anyone who cares to look will see that he says this without any bearing on the discussion he is in the middle of; for when he is laying down rules about marriage and purity, how will it not look as though he has thrown these words in for no reason? And in the second place, who will say that a man does wrong if — supposing it can be done — he submits to the operation, because of the disgrace that most people attach to being circumcised?

All of this we have said in order to show that the aim of the divine power which gave us the sacred Scriptures is not that we should take in only what the wording presents — since sometimes what it presents is not even true as it stands, but makes no sense and cannot be done — and to show that certain things have been woven in besides: into the history that really happened, and into the legislation that is useful just as it stands.

But no one should suppose that we are saying this of everything: that no history ever happened, because a certain one did not; or that no law is to be kept as it stands, because a certain one, taken by the wording, makes no sense or cannot be done; or that what is written about the Savior is not true in a way the senses could take in; or that no law and no command of his has to be kept. To that we have to answer that in some cases it is perfectly clear to us that the historical account is true. Abraham was buried in the double cave at Hebron, and so were Isaac and Jacob, and one wife of each of them. Shechem was given to Joseph as his portion. Jerusalem is the chief city of Judea, and the temple of God was built in it by Solomon. And there are countless other such statements. In fact the things that are true as history are far more numerous than the things woven in beside them that are purely spiritual. [j]

Again, who would not say that the command “Honor your father and your mother, so that it may go well with you” is useful without any higher meaning at all, and is to be kept — the apostle Paul having used the very same words? And what need is there to speak of “You shall not murder,” “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not give false testimony”? And again, there are commands written in the gospel where the question does not even arise whether they are to be kept as they stand — for instance, the one that says, “But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother,” and so on, and “But I tell you, do not swear at all.” And in the apostle the wording is to be kept: “Warn the disorderly, encourage the fainthearted, hold on to the weak, be patient with everyone” — even though, for readers who want more, each of these can keep the depths of God’s wisdom safe without the command in its plain sense being set aside.

The exact reader, though, will be pulled two ways over certain passages, unable without much testing to declare whether this or that supposed history happened as the wording has it, and whether the plain sense of this or that law is to be kept. That is why the reader must be exact, and, keeping the Savior’s order, “Search the Scriptures,” test carefully how far the sense of the wording is true and how far it is impossible, and, as far as he can, track down, from similar expressions, the meaning scattered everywhere through Scripture of what cannot be understood as it stands.

Since, then, as will be clear to those who read, the connected sense as far as the wording goes is impossible, while the sense that leads is not impossible but is even the true one, we must make it our ambition to grasp the whole meaning — linking together, in a way the mind can follow, the account of what is impossible as it stands with what is not only not impossible but also true as history, read as allegory alongside the things that, as far as the wording goes, never happened. For this is where we stand about all of divine Scripture: the whole of it has the spiritual meaning, but not the whole of it the bodily one, since in many places the bodily meaning is shown to be impossible. So the man who comes to the divine books reverently, as to writings that are God’s, must bring great attention with him. And the way of understanding them looks to us like this. [p]

The Scriptures report that God chose out a nation for himself on the earth, and they call it by more than one name. The whole nation is called Israel, and it is also called Jacob. When it was divided in the days of Jeroboam son of Nebat, the ten tribes said to be under him were named Israel, and the remaining two, with the tribe of Levi, ruled by kings from David’s line, were named Judah. And the whole territory the people of this nation lived in, given them by God, is called Judea, and its chief city is Jerusalem — the chief city, that is, of a good many cities, whose names lie scattered about in many other places but are listed together in the book of Joshua son of Nun.

That being how things stand, the apostle lifts our power of thought higher and says somewhere, “Look at Israel according to the flesh” — as though there were an Israel according to the Spirit. And elsewhere he says, “For it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God,” and “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel”; and “the Jew is not the one who is a Jew where it shows, nor is circumcision what shows in the flesh; the Jew is the one who is a Jew in secret, and circumcision is of the heart, in spirit and not in letter.” For if the verdict about the Jew is taken from what is hidden, we have to understand that just as there is a bodily race of Jews, so there is a nation of Jews in secret, the soul having come by this nobility for certain reasons that cannot be spoken. [r]

There are also many prophecies about Israel and Judah that tell what is going to happen to them. And surely all those promises written for them — so lowly, as far as the wording goes, showing no height and nothing worthy of a promise of God — surely they need to be taken up into a hidden meaning? And if the promises are things the mind grasps, announced through things the senses can take in, then the people the promises are made to are not bodily either.

But we will not linger over the Jew who is a Jew in secret, or over the Israelite according to the inner man; what has been said is enough for anyone who has some sting left in him. We go back to our subject and say that Jacob is the father of the twelve patriarchs, and they of the heads of the people, and these again of the Israelites who come after. So do not the bodily Israelites trace their descent back to the heads of the people, and the heads of the people to the patriarchs, and the patriarchs to Jacob and to those still higher up? And do not the Israelites of the mind, whose type the bodily ones were, come from clans, the clans having come from tribes, and the tribes from one man whose birth was not bodily in that way but of a better kind — he too born of Isaac, and Isaac descended from Abraham, all of them going back to Adam, whom the apostle says is Christ? For every beginning of the fatherhoods that are reckoned toward the God of all began, lower down, from Christ, who comes after the God and Father of all, and who is in this way the father of every soul, as Adam is the father of all human beings. And if Eve too has been rightly referred by Paul to the church, it is no wonder that Cain, born of Eve, and all who come after him, whose descent goes back to Eve, should be impressions of the church — since all of them came from the church in the first sense of the word.

Now if what is said to us about Israel and its tribes and its clans is meant to strike us, then when the Savior says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” we do not understand the words as the Ebionites do — who are poor in understanding, taking their name from the poverty of their intellect, since “Ebion” means “poor” in Hebrew — as though the Savior had come especially to the Israelites of the flesh. For “it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God.” [u]

Again, the apostle teaches this about Jerusalem: “The Jerusalem above is free, and she is the mother of us all.” And in another letter: “But you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to countless angels, to the festal gathering and the church of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven.” If, then, Israel belongs to a race of souls, and if there is a city of Jerusalem in heaven, it follows that the cities of Israel have the heavenly Jerusalem for their chief city, and that it is therefore the chief city of all Judea. So whatever is foretold about Jerusalem and said of it — if we listen to Paul’s words as God’s, and as the words of a man who speaks wisdom — we have to understand the Scriptures to be speaking of the heavenly city, and of the whole territory taken in by the cities of the holy land. Perhaps it is to those cities that the Savior points us when he gives the men who have proved themselves by handling their minas well the charge of five cities or ten.

If, then, the prophecies about Judea and Jerusalem and Israel and Judah and Jacob, not understood by us in a fleshly sense, point to mysteries of that kind, it follows also that what is predicted about Egypt and the Egyptians, Babylon and the Babylonians, Tyre and the Tyrians, Sidon and the Sidonians, and the other nations, is spoken not only of these bodily Egyptians and Babylonians and Tyrians and Sidonians, but of their spiritual counterparts too. For if there are spiritual Israelites, it follows that there are spiritual Egyptians and Babylonians as well.

What Ezekiel says about Pharaoh king of Egypt does not fit the case of any man who ruled, or was said to rule, over Egypt — as will be plain to anyone who gives it careful thought. In the same way, what is said about the ruler of Tyre cannot be understood of some man who ruled Tyre. And what is said in many places, and especially in Isaiah, about Nebuchadnezzar cannot be explained of that individual: the man Nebuchadnezzar did not fall from heaven, was not the morning star, and did not rise upon the earth in the morning. Nor would any man of understanding take what Ezekiel says about Egypt — that for forty years it would be laid waste, so that no human footprint would be found on it, and that the slaughter would be so great that blood would run over the whole of it and stand knee-deep — of the Egypt that lies beside the Ethiopians, whose bodies are blackened by the sun.

And perhaps, as people here who die the death everyone dies are arranged, on the strength of what they did here, so as to be given different places according to the measure of their sins — if they are judged worthy of the region called Hades — so those who die there, if one may put it that way, come down into this Hades, being judged to deserve different dwellings, better or worse, throughout this whole space of earth, and to be born of parents of one kind or another. So an Israelite may sometimes fall among Scythians, and an Egyptian come down into Judea. And yet the Savior came to gather the lost sheep of the house of Israel; and since many of the Israelites did not yield to his teaching, those from the Gentiles were called. … [z]

These things, we suppose, have been hidden away in the histories. For “the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field; when a man finds it, he hides it, and in his joy he goes and sells everything he has and buys that field.” So let us notice whether the plain, surface meaning of Scripture, the one that lies open to everyone, is not like a field full of plants of every kind, while the things lying in it — not visible to all, but buried, as it were, under the plants that can be seen — are the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge, which the Spirit through Isaiah calls dark and unseen and concealed, God alone being able to break the bronze gates that hide them and burst the iron bars that are on the gates. He does it so that everything said in the book of Genesis may be found out: what it says about the various true kinds and, so to speak, seeds of souls, some standing close to Israel and some far off from it; and about the going down into Egypt of the seventy souls, so that there they might become “as the stars of heaven in number.” But since not all who come from them are the light of the world — for “not all who are of Israel are Israel” — out of seventy souls they become “as the sand beside the seashore, past counting.”