Commentaria in Exodum
Or rather, “God gave favour,” that is, God inclined the hearts of the Egyptians (for the hearts of all are in the hand and will of God) to a certain tender love of the Hebrews, and to wish them well and do them good, so that the Hebrews seemed to the Egyptians most worthy not only of compassion but of love, honour, and indeed of any kindnesses and gifts whatever; whence it came to pass that they willingly lent them their goods, nay offered them, says Cajetan, encouraging them to ask confidently whatever they wished; for in place of what we have, “that they lent unto them,” the Hebrew is vayashilum, that is, and they made them ask, namely for the vessels which they were to use in the sacrifice to which Moses had said they were called by God, that by this means the Egyptians might appease the God whom they had offended.
THAT THEY LENT UNTO THEM.—Josephus errs, therefore, who says that these things were given as a gift to the Hebrews by the Egyptians, both that they might depart the sooner, and because of the intimacy of neighbourhood and former familiarity: for Scripture says that these things were not given but lent, and that the Hebrews, appropriating them, despoiled Egypt.
See here the changeableness of riches, that they pass as if lent from one to another. The fables feign that Plutus, or Dis, the god of riches, is lame in his coming and winged in his departure: because riches approach slowly in life as on lame feet, in death fly away on eagle’s wings. Saladin had won the empire of Egypt and Syria with great labour: dying, he ordered his shirt to be carried round the camp on a spear, and a herald to proclaim: “This one tunic is all that remains to Saladin the prince from so great wealth and empire.”
AND THEY STRIPPED THE EGYPTIANS.—You will say: then the Hebrews committed spoliation, that is, theft and robbery.
I answer: Spoil taken by God’s command is a just and holy spoil. For God, commanding you to despoil someone, by that very act bestows on you right and dominion over his goods. So St. Augustine, Rupert, St. Thomas, Abulensis and others.‸
Secondly, apart from God’s command, the Hebrews could take the goods of the Egyptians by spoil, both under the title of wages: for they had served them most laboriously; and under the title of a just war: for the Egyptians were public enemies, who had persecuted them even to death and had harassed them in wondrous ways: the Hebrews could therefore despoil them as their public enemies. Hence it is said in Wisdom 10: “God rendered to the just the wages of their labours.” So Philo. St. Augustine adds, book 22 Against Faustus, chap. 71: “The Egyptians,” he says, “were sacrilegious and unjust, who, ill using that gold, that is, a creature of God, to the injury of the Creator, served their idols with it, and had unjustly and violently afflicted strangers with unpaid labour: both the Hebrews, therefore, were worthy to be commanded such things, and the Egyptians to suffer such things.”
You will say: At least the Hebrews lied, asking as a loan what they intended to snatch and never return.
I answer, they did not lie, because as a loan they intended to return it, in so far as it was a loan; but because that loan was at the same time given them by God as a gift, they intended therefore to keep it, not under the title of a loan but of a gift. Shrewdly, then, they used the title of a loan, and pretended it for their just spoliation; for otherwise they could not have obtained that very thing which was due to them and given them by God: for the Egyptians would never have lent their goods if they had known the Hebrews would keep them.
Secondly, others answer: Those among the Hebrews who were good thought in good faith to return these things to the Egyptians; but when the latter, against the faith given, pursued them hostilely as they departed, the Hebrews judged themselves released from the duty of returning them, and the Egyptians unworthy to have them returned.
But from what has been said it seems truer that the Hebrews at first, before the Egyptians pursued them, received them on loan with the intention of never returning them and of despoiling Egypt; for God had foretold and granted this to them, as is plain here, verse 2.
Thirdly, Tertullian adds, book 2 Against Marcion, chap. 20, as received from an ancient tradition, that the Egyptians sent envoys to Moses and the Hebrews, who had already crossed the Red Sea, to demand back these goods: the Hebrews answered that they would do so, provided the Egyptians themselves paid the wages of so hard and long a servitude in Egypt, and of so many labours; and when the Egyptians made a computation of the wages to be paid, the reckoning came to so great a sum that the Egyptians thought it better to leave those goods to the Hebrews than to pay the wages owed them. The credit of this tradition rests with Tertullian; to me it is certainly suspect: for the Egyptians being drowned in the Red Sea, and the Hebrews having crossed it, all their fellowship and all intercourse seems to have been severed.
Tropologically, the Catholic Fathers and Doctors despoiled Egypt when they transferred the wisdom and eloquence drawn from the heathen to the illustration of the faith and Church of Christ. Hence Porphyry, an enemy of the Christians, used to say that Origen had brought all the riches of the Greeks to enrich the poverty of the Jewish and Christian sect, as Eusebius testifies, book 6 of the History, chap. 19. And indeed we see now that all eloquence, knowledge and wisdom have failed among the heathen, Turks and Saracens, and passed over to the Christians, who alone now in the whole world flourish in every art, science, eloquence and discipline.
37. AND THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL SET FORWARD FROM RAMESSES TO SOCOTH, BEING ABOUT SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND MEN ON FOOT.—“They set forward” with God as leader, and showing the way by a pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, as is plain from the following chapter, verse 21.
Note: The Hebrews, journeying from Egypt to Chanaan, made 42 stations or halting-places in the desert, of which St. Jerome wrote a treatise to Fabiola. The first halting-place or station was at Ramesses: for thither the Hebrews about to depart assembled from all Egypt: whence Ramesses aptly signifies the thunder of joy, says St. Jerome. For the Hebrews were filled there with a wondrous, new and unaccustomed joy, because they saw that they had now escaped from the hard servitude of Egypt into liberty. Valerius Maximus, book 4, chap. 8: “Philip, king of the Macedonians, having been conquered,” he says, “when all Greece had assembled for a notable spectacle, Quintus Flamininus ordered it to be proclaimed by a herald: The Senate and Roman people command that all the cities of Greece which were under the sway of King Philip be free and exempt: on hearing which men, struck with greatest and unexpected joy, at first, as though believing they had not heard what they had heard, kept silence. Then, the herald’s proclamation being repeated, they filled the sky with such an eagerness of shouting that it is certainly established that the birds that flew overhead fell down astonished and terrified.” How great, then, was the exultation of the Hebrews, going forth from the workhouse and the iron furnace into this field of full liberty? “The price of liberty,” says Justinian, “is incomparable”; for in civil law slaves are accounted as nothing, and have no civil head. For what is more wretched than to be assigned to one who has power of life and death over you? Whence Cicero: “Death,” he says, “is the remedy of servitude, and virtue perishes in him whom servile necessity has walled in”: hence slaves were called rogues (furciferi).
AT SOCOTH.—The second station, therefore, was at Socoth, which was situated between the Red Sea and Egypt then under cultivation; for all that lies from Egypt to the Red Sea seems formerly to have belonged to Egypt, though it was uncultivated and desert. It was called Socoth, that is, tabernacles, because the Hebrews going out of Egypt first pitched tabernacles there, says
ABOUT SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND MEN ON FOOT.—“About,” that is, more or less. The Hebrew: as it were six hundred thousand; whence Josephus says that they made up the number of 600,000.
Note: These six hundred thousand were foot soldiers, or men of war, who had reached or passed the age of 20; for from the twentieth year and upward the Hebrews are wont to enrol their men for military service. Abulensis thinks that the Levites are not numbered here, who from the thirtieth year, at which they began to serve the tabernacle, are numbered at eight thousand five hundred and eighty, Numbers 4, 48. But he seems to be mistaken; for the tribe of Levi was not yet separated from the others and added to the priesthood: it seems, therefore, to be numbered here with the others; but afterwards, when it received the priesthood, it was then not numbered among the other tribes, as is plain from Numbers 1, 33. Not numbered here, therefore, are the little ones and youths who had not yet reached the twentieth year, nor the women, nor the decrepit, who all together are wont to make up another half and more of the people; for fighting men are wont to stand to the whole people as forty to a hundred: by which reckoning the whole people of the Hebrews would have had here one million five hundred thousand men. Nay, the Hebrews hand down that there were one million eight hundred thousand, to whom was added an innumerable multitude of Egyptians, who, adhering to the Jews, either to Judaism converted, wished to accompany them; so that many think that the whole of those going out were thirty hundred thousand, that is, three million men, all of whom God fed with heavenly manna in the desert for 40 years. All these went out on one day, not in confusion but disposed in order by their troops, as in battle array, which Moses notes and celebrates, verse 41, as a kind of miracle.