Commentaria in Numeros
Verse 7. “Who is most faithful in all my house,” as if to say: In my whole Church, that is, in the whole assembly of Israel, there is none more faithful than Moses; in Hebrew it is, “faithful is he,” where “he” has emphasis, as though to say: He is faithful by antonomasia and by excellence.
Verse 8. “And by figures doth he see the Lord.” These words in the Hebrew the more recent interpreters separate from the preceding by a distinguishing accent, and render, “and the likeness of the Lord he beholds,” as if to say: Moses sees a bodily form of God, in which God presents himself to him to be seen. So also the Chaldee and the Septuagint, who render, “and he saw the glory of the Lord,” namely Exodus xxxiv. But the Hebrew has not a preterite but a future, which here, as often elsewhere, is taken for the present. The sense of all the versions, though differing in words, comes to the same.
Verse 10. “The cloud also departed,” not by going forward and leading the way: for so it would have been a sign that the camp was to be moved; but by rising above the tabernacle: for so it was a sign of God angry, and departing from Mary and Aaron.
“And behold Mary appeared white as snow with a leprosy.” See here that leprosy is the punishment of the rebellious and of those who murmur against Prelates, as I said at the beginning of Leviticus xiii. Moreover, this is a fitting punishment of murmuring; for murmuring creeps on like leprosy, and infects the whole body, namely the whole congregation and assembly. Whence, as lepers, Leviticus xiii, are commanded to be cast out of the camp and to dwell apart outside the camp, so here the murmuring Mary is cast out of the camp, lest she infect it by her murmuring and her leprosy.
Hear St. Ephrem treating of the disease of the tongue: “From the most foul leprosy of Mary the prophetess we are taught, he says, how grievous and detestable a vice is detraction. The body which was seen infected with leprosy was like a mirror of the soul, which was not seen, and showed its stain. From that corruption of the flesh it was made plain how the soul of a detracting man is corrupted; for as she had fallen away from her brother, so also her own body fell away from her, that from herself she might learn charity.” See Origen here, homily 7; likewise St. Chrysostom, homily on Psalm c, where among other things he says: “Detraction is a grievous evil, a turbulent demon, never leaving a man at peace. From it hatreds spring up, quarrels are kindled, dissensions take their rise, evil suspicions are bred: without any cause it makes an enemy of him who a little before was a friend: it overturns whole houses, and stirs peaceful cities to war: it beautifully dissolves the bonds of peace, and breaks the knot of great charity. He who studies detraction serves the devil, as one who carries out the works of calumny. Wherefore the detractor is to be driven away like a liar and a thief.
“Beware lest thou detract at all, nor wish to seem praiseworthy by the blame of others; and learn rather to order thy own life than to carp at another’s.”
St. Augustine, as Possidius testifies in his Life, chap. xxii, against the pestilence of human custom, wrote on his table this distich:
Whoever loves to gnaw with words the life of the absent, let him know that this table is forbidden to him.
“Whence also certain fellow-bishops, his most intimate friends, who had forgotten that writing and spoke against it, he sometimes reproved so sharply as to say that either those verses must be erased from the table, or he would rise from the midst of the meal to his chamber: which I and others who were present at that table have experienced.” So Possidius. See the same St. Augustine against detractors. St. John the Almoner, Patriarch of Alexandria, forbade even those who sinned publicly to be censured: “For it may be,” he said, “that they have blotted out the sin by penance. And it is unjust for a man to reproach wantonly what has been mercifully forgiven by God.”
Truly the Wise Man compares the evil-speaking tongue to a serpent: “If a serpent bite in silence,” he says, “he that backbiteth secretly is nothing better,” Ecclesiasticus x.
“The detractor and the willing hearer, both carry the devil on their tongue,” says St. Bernard in a sermon. This is the office of the demon, who is thence called diabolus, that is, calumniator.
The same: “The tongue of the detractor,” he says, “is a most savage viper; it is a lance that pierces three with one blow”: for it kills the soul, first, of the speaker; second, of the hearer; third, the good name of him who is detracted from. Hear him, in his sermon On the threefold guard of hand, tongue and heart: “Is not this tongue a viper? Most savage indeed, since it so deadly infects three with one breath. Is not this tongue a lance? Surely, and a most sharp one, which pierces three with one blow. Their tongue, it says, is a sharp sword. A two-edged sword indeed, nay a three-edged, is the tongue of the detractor: nay worse, he says, than the point by which the side of the Lord was pierced. Speech is a light thing, because it flies lightly, but it wounds gravely; it passes lightly, but burns gravely; it enters the mind lightly, but does not leave it lightly.”
Hear the Gentiles also. Cicero in the Offices: “To detract from another, and to increase one’s own advantage by another man’s disadvantage, is more contrary to nature than death, than pain, than the other things which can befall the body or external goods. For they take away the common life and fellowship of men.”
Horace in the Satires:
He who gnaws at an absent friend, who can invent what he has not seen, who cannot keep secrets entrusted to him: he is black; beware of him, Roman.
Verse 11. “Lay not upon us this sin,” that is, impute not to us the sin we have committed, be not offended with us, nor punish, nor permit or consent that we be punished by God; but spare, and have mercy and forgive, and pray that Mary may be cured of the leprosy, and that her leprosy, since I am a partaker of her murmuring, may not seize and attack me.
Verse 12. “Let her not be as one dead.” Both because the leprosy, creeping on and eating Mary away, was gradually making her like one dead, or like a maimed and deformed abortive; and because leprosy was a kind of civil death: for it separated a man from the dwelling and society of men (1).
In the Hebrew it is: let her not be like a dead foetus, of which, when it comes out of the womb of its mother, half the flesh is wasted;
Verse 14. “If her father had spit in her face,” etc., as if to say: If the father of Mary thy sister, being angry, had spit in her face, she, out of shame and reverence for her father, would not dare to approach her father for seven days; how much more does it become her, now that she has been marked by me with leprosy for her sin, to be confounded, and shut out of the camp, and not to come to me into the tabernacle before seven days?
“Let her be separated seven days without the camp, and afterwards she shall be called again.” So in fact for seven days Mary, as a leper, was shut out of the camp: when they had passed she was cured by God and recalled. Where note that at her recall the ceremonies and expiations prescribed for lepers, Leviticus xiv, were not observed. For God’s miraculous healing and recall of Mary was itself a sufficient purification and expiation of her, so that she needed no other legal one. So Abulensis.
See here the just punishment of arrogance. Mary had proudly exalted herself above her brother Moses, the leader of the camp, and had despised him: therefore justly here is she punished with leprosy, so that, as infamous and unworthy, not only from the sight of her brother but from that of the people, she is separated from the camp.
A like example, and much more admirable, is related by our Rader from the Greek Meadow, tract On Simplicity, chap. v, concerning the Stylite of Edessa, who, because he had judged his own brother simple and had despised him for spurning gold, while he himself had prudently, as it seemed to him, distributed the same gold to Religious and the poor, was rebuked by an angel, and separated from his own brother for the whole of life, and commanded to stand 49 years on a pillar; after so long and hard a penance he at length obtained pardon in the fiftieth year, or jubilee: for then an angel appearing to him announced that his sin was remitted and that he was restored to the grace of God, and moreover loaded him with wonderful consolation and a new blessing of God.