Commentaria in Leviticum
16 and 17. AND SO YE SHALL OFFER (at pentecost) A NEW SACRIFICE TO THE LORD, OUT OF ALL YOUR HABITATIONS, TWO LOAVES OF FIRSTFRUITS.—For sacrifice the Hebrew is minchah, that is, oblation, from a root meaning to bring, to offer; for this oblation of loaves was not properly a sacrifice. For these loaves were made of leavened fine flour, which could not be sacrificed, as is plain from chap. 2, verse 11, and so no libations were offered with these loaves. These loaves were therefore only the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, which were given to the priests, and went to their food and use. Note: Each family had to offer these firstfruits of loaves at pentecost, as is here said: and each brought them from his own house; otherwise it was with the sheaf of ears at the pasch; and although Abulensis so understands it, not that each brought these loaves from his own field or house to Jerusalem, but that each at Jerusalem bought two such loaves, and offered them in the temple, as also doves and other victims (whence there were sellers of all these at Jerusalem, whom Christ cast out of the temple), yet the Hebrew Scripture here teaches the contrary; for it reads thus: Out of all your dwellings you shall bring two loaves of elevation; which words sufficiently signify that each ought to bring his own loaves from his own house to the temple, that each might offer the firstfruits of his own crops in thanksgiving to God. For this was one cause why the feast of pentecost was instituted, that they might offer to God the firstfruits of loaves. So Josephus, book 3 Antiq., chap. 10. The other cause was that the Hebrews might be reminded of the law given at pentecost, and in return for it give thanks to God, and recall that law, that they might observe it more exactly. So St. Jerome to Fabiola: “Pentecost,” he says, “is the feast of the law.” The same teaches St. Augustine, Question 95 in the New Testament.
Morally. The law is indeed a great benefit of God, and is to be celebrated by a feast: for it is itself a ray of the eternal law, emanating from the eternal reasons and ideas, which live in the mind of God, by which he himself rules and governs all things. “There are two things,” says Nazianzen, “by which we are ruled, nature and law”; and St. Augustine, book 9 On the City: “The censure of all laws,” he says, “is empty, unless it bear the image of the divine law.” Plato said that “it is necessary to lay down laws for men, that they may live according to them, otherwise they would in nothing differ from wild beasts. The cause is that no man’s genius is so framed by nature as sufficiently to know what conduces to the public advantage of human life, and if he knew it, always to be able and willing to do what he knew to be best.” So he himself, book 4 On the Laws.
Demosthenes used to say that “the laws are the soul of a city.” Heraclitus said “that citizens ought to fight for the laws no less than for their walls, because without laws a city can in no way be safe, though it can be without walls.” So Laertius, book 9, chap. 10. Archidamus, asked who were the rulers of the Spartan city, answered: “The laws, and lawful magistrates.” He judged gravely that in a well-ordered commonwealth supreme authority should be given to the laws, and that it is not right for any magistrate to attempt anything against the public laws. So Plutarch in the Laconics.
Agesilaus, asked what the laws of Lycurgus had contributed to Sparta, said: “Contempt of pleasures.” Plutarch in the same place.
Cyrus, asked whom he thought to be unjust, answered: “Those who do not use the law.” So Maximus.
The barbarians of Brazil lack in their language three letters, namely F, L, R, and fittingly; for they lack faith, law, king. Osorius and Maffei are witnesses in the Indian History.
Philo, book On Joseph: “What the physician is to the sick,” he says, “the law is to the city.” A crown was among the ancients the hieroglyph of law, because it is bound together with sure bonds, by which our life, as if tied, is restrained. So Pierius, hierogl. 4.
Finally, “the law is the light of life.” “Thy word,” says the Psalmist, “is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my paths,” Psalm 118; which psalm is nothing else than a eulogy of the law. Again: “The words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried by the fire, purged from the earth, refined seven times,” Psalm 11, ver. 7.
Moreover, “law is nothing else than right reason, derived from the divinity of the gods, commanding what is honourable and forbidding the contrary,” says Cicero, Philip. 1; and in his speech for Cluentius: “The foundation of liberty,” he says, “the fountain of equity, the mind, the spirit, the counsel and the judgment of the state, are placed in the laws.” Peculiar, however, was the benefit of God to the Hebrews, that he himself gave them the law, and that first, and before the laws of other nations. For the first lawgiver in the world was Moses, that is, God through Moses. Following him, laws were given to the Indians by the Gymnosophists, to the Egyptians by the priests, to the Babylonians by the Chaldeans, to the Persians by the Magi, to the Gauls by the Druids, to the Locrians by Zaleucus, to the Athenians by Solon, to the Lacedaemonians by Lycurgus, to the Cretans by Minos, to the Corinthians by Philo, to the Getae by Zamolxis, to the Rhegians by Androdamus, to the Milesians by Hippodamus, to the Thurians by Charondas, to the Thebans by Philolaus, to the Carthaginians by Phaleas. Among the Romans, P. Papirius first gathered the royal laws into one. Then Appius Claudius the decemvir wrote the laws of the twelve tables. Following him were Appius Claudius Caecus, Sempronius Sophus, Scipio Nasica, Q. Fabius, M. Cato and others.
17. TWO LOAVES OF THE FIRSTFRUITS OF TWO TENTHS.—From what was said chap. 14, ver. 10, and what will be said chap. 24, ver. 5, it will be plain that two tenths of fine flour, and the two loaves made from it, were of about thirteen pounds and a half in weight.
18. YOU SHALL OFFER WITH THE LOAVES SEVEN LAMBS WITHOUT BLEMISH OF A YEAR OLD—namely for a holocaust, because this, as the chief, is always understood when sacrifice is named, unless another kind of it is expressed. So Abulensis.
Note: In Numbers 28:27 other victims also are added, which were wont to be offered at this feast of pentecost on account of the solemnity of the feast: namely two calves, one ram, seven lambs, one buck goat for sin. That these are different from those which are here prescribed is plain both from elsewhere and from the fact that there two calves, here only one, are commanded: because those victims were prescribed precisely for the feast itself, but these are here prescribed only for honouring the offering of the firstfruits, that these victims might be given to God in sacrifice together with the offering of the firstfruits. The victims, therefore, of the feast of pentecost itself, and of the other feasts, are reckoned not in this chapter but in Num. chap. 28 and 29 (as is plain to one who looks). So Abulensis. Whence Josephus, book 3, chap. 10, enumerating all the victims of pentecost, says: “They make holocausts of three calves, two rams (Holy Scripture numbers three rams: an error therefore seems to have crept into Josephus’s number, so that three must be put for two), fourteen lambs, and two kids for sin.” Josephus omits the two lambs offered as peace-offering victims. Radulphus, however, thinks the victims here and those prescribed in Num. 28 are the same: but the discrepancy just mentioned he himself tries to solve by a mystery. “It matters not,” he says, “whether two calves with one ram, or one calf with two rams, be said to be in the holocausts, since both pastors and doctors (who mystically are rams and calves) are one by the concord of faith and peace, and are understood as two, if we regard the distance of the two peoples over whom they are set.” But these things do not satisfy the letter, nor the literal sense, which Radulphus often seems to remove and impugn as Jewish, after the manner of Origen and others who are wholly in tropologies. Tropologically, the number fifty of pentecost is the index and symbol of perfect penance (of those, namely, who had before lived in the filth and stench of sins).