Commentaria in Deuteronomium
THE THIRD KIND OF THE LAWS OF MOSES ARE MIXED, AND ARE CEREMONIAL AND JUDICIAL AT ONCE.
1. He that shall not keep the phase at the appointed time shall be cut off from among his people, Num. ix, 13.
2. Seven days (the phase) there shall not be found leaven in your houses: he that shall eat leavened bread, that soul shall perish out of Israel, Exod. xii, 19.
3. If thou perceive that there is a hard and doubtful matter in judgment between blood and blood, leprosy and leprosy, cause and cause, and thou see that the words of the judges within thy gates do vary, etc., thou shalt come to the priests and to the judge, and shalt do whatsoever they shall say to thee, etc.
But he that will be proud, and refuse to obey the commandment of the priest, and the decree of the judge, shall die, Deut. xvii, 8.
4. The Edomites and Egyptians shall not enter into the church of the Lord until the third generation, nor the bastard until the tenth, nor the Ammonites and Moabites for ever, because they would not meet you with bread and water, and because they hired Balaam against thee: thou shalt not make peace with them, nor seek good things for them, Deuter. xxiii, vers. 1 and following.
5. If thou find a bird’s nest, thou shalt not take the dam with the young; but thou shalt take the young, and let the dam fly away, Deuter. xxii, 6.
6. Thou shalt not plough with an ox and an ass together, Deuter. xxii, 10.
7. If a jealous husband have his wife in suspicion of adultery, he shall bring her to the priest, who shall give her to drink the waters of malediction: which when she hath drunk, if she be guilty, her womb shall swell and burst, and her thigh shall rot, and so she shall be a curse. I have fully described the rite of this, with the sacrifice, on Num. v.
8. The land shall not be sold for ever, but according to the number of the years that remain until the jubilee: for it is mine, and you are strangers and my tenants, Levit. xxv, 23. See what is said there.
THE FOURTH KIND OF THE LAWS OF MOSES ARE MIXED, AND ARE MORAL, CEREMONIAL AND JUDICIAL AT ONCE.
1. He that lieth with a woman in her monthly courses, both shall be put to death, Levit. chap. xx, 18.
2. The daughter of a priest, if she be taken in whoredom, and dishonour the name of her father, shall be burnt with fire, Levit. xxi, 9.
3. He that polluteth the sabbath, that is, doeth work therein, shall be put to death, Exod. xxxi, 14.
4. The Levites shall give of their tithes tithes to the priests, and the best and the fattest of them, lest they pollute the oblation of the children of Israel, and die, Numb. xviii, 32.
5. A father may annul the vows of his daughter, a husband those of his wife, on the first day on which he knew of them, not on the second, Num. xxx.
6. A leper shall dwell alone outside the camp, Levit.
7. Thou shalt not make thy cattle go with beasts of another kind, Levit. xix, 19.
8. The crocodile, the mouse, the mole, the weasel, the lizard thou shalt not eat, Levit. xi, 29.
9. Lastly, here belong the laws of death passed upon the incestuous, who commit fornication with a niece, daughter-in-law, aunt, etc., Levit. xx, 19. For these laws are partly natural, partly ceremonial, partly judicial,
OF THE MEASURES AND WEIGHTS OF THE HEBREWS, GREEKS, ROMANS AND SPANIARDS, FROM ROBERT CENALIS, AGRICOLA, ALCIATI, AND ESPECIALLY VILLALPANDUS AND ALCAZAR, WHO HAVE WRITTEN OF THEM MOST RECENTLY AND EXACTLY.
I would premise that here I take the common pound of 12 ounces, not the greater, which is of 16 ounces.
THE TALENT. There is one talent among the Hebrews, and it contains three thousand sicles, fifteen hundred ounces, twelve thousand drachms, 50 Hebrew minas, 120 Attic, 125 Roman pounds.
Ten thousand talents of gold are 120 millions of golden pieces or drachms; for the French gold crown is of one drachm. A pound of gold therefore contains twelve ounces of gold, that is, ninety-six drachms or French crowns. A talent of gold therefore contained twelve thousand French crowns. A thousand French crowns, ounces.
There was one talent of gold, another of silver, another of brass: all these were of equal weight, but of unequal price.
The proportion of the price of gold to the price of silver in the time of Plato was twelvefold, so that one ounce or pound of gold was worth 12 ounces or pounds of silver, as Plato testifies in the Socrates; it was the same in the time of David. For David bought the floor of Ornan the Jebusite, with the oxen and the wain, for 50 sicles of gold, which make six hundred sicles of silver, as appears from 2 Kings xxiv, 24, compared with 1 Paral. xxi, 25, where the Hebrew has: David gave to Ornan for the place sicles of gold in weight (that is, in price and estimation) of six hundred sicles, namely of silver, that is, whose weight was estimated at six hundred silver sicles, or which were worth six hundred silver sicles. Hence in the Hebrew there is the accent zakeph, which, like a hypocolon, distinguishes and separates the word gold from the word weight. For silver was mentioned immediately before. For David says in the preceding verse: “I will give silver as much as it is worth.” For among the Jews the sicle was commonly understood to be of silver, because by silver they fixed the prices of things in buying and selling. Thou wilt say: Our Interpreter renders it: David therefore gave to Ornan for the place six hundred sicles of gold of most just weight. Therefore these sicles were of gold, not of silver. I answer: They were of gold as to the material (for the coin was of gold), but of silver as to the estimation of value and price, which, as I have said, was commonly reckoned by the silver sicle, not the golden. The sense therefore is: David gave, etc., sicles of gold, that is in gold, six hundred, namely of the common sort, that is, silver: as if to say, He gave him golden sicles which, weighed in just weight, were worth six hundred common sicles, namely silver ones. Six hundred sicles of gold, therefore, are the same as the value of six hundred sicles of silver in gold, or in golden coin. So the Belgians commonly understand by a “royal” a silver one, not a golden; wherefore if one among them say: The king gave me six hundred royals in gold, they understand silver ones in price, but golden in material and coin.
The Hebrew requires this sense, and so this place is learnedly and aptly reconciled with 2 Kings xxiv, 24, where the same floor is said to have been bought for fifty sicles, namely full and perfect ones, that is, golden. For although it is said there, fifty sicles of silver, yet it is clear from what has been said that they were golden; “silver” there, therefore, is the same as money, as if to say: He gave him money of 50 sicles. For so we commonly call silver money, whether it be of silver or of gold, as it was here.
Thus Andreas Masius on Josue, chapter vii, vers. 21, Villalpandus, tom. iii on Ezechiel, p. 414, and Alcazar, On Weights, prop. 22, p. 60, explain both places and reconcile them with one another, teaching that in 1 Paral. xxi, 25, a sicle of gold is called a weight (for Sekel, that is sicle, in Hebrew signifies weight; for the money of the ancients was not stamped, as now, but was weighed out, e.g. so many drachms or ounces of gold or silver) of gold which is worth a sicle of silver, so that six hundred sicles of gold, that is in gold, are called fifty sicles, that is two hundred drachms (for a sicle weighed 4 drachms) of gold, which were worth six hundred sicles of silver, or 2400 drachms of silver.
I know that St. Jerome, Abulensis, Vatablus and Cajetan reconcile these things otherwise, and apparently more easily, by saying that the part of the floor in which David sacrificed was first bought by him for 50 sicles of silver; and that afterwards the whole floor, and the whole mount Sion, was bought by him for six hundred sicles of gold; but Villalpandus sharply impugns this. In the first edition I touched on this only in passing and did not unfold it, and so, while labouring to be brief, I become obscure. For these matters belong to the books of Kings, and ought to have been explained there: yet I have been pleased to remove the scruple from the reader here.
David, 1 Paral. xxii, 14, left to Solomon for the temple a hundred thousand talents of gold, that is, twelve and a half millions of pounds of gold, namely twelve hundred millions of French gold crowns; as much he left him in silver: in all, therefore, he left him twice twelve hundred, that is two thousand four hundred millions of crowns; more gold than there is scarcely in the whole of Europe. Alcazar, however, thinks these talents of gold were of silver, and that the silver talents were of brass: and so of the talents of gold there would have been only the twelfth part of the talents just mentioned, and of the talents of silver only the fiftieth part; that is, there would have been only a hundred millions in gold, and twenty-four in silver, that is, in all 124 millions of French crowns. But the words of Scripture require something other and more: of which matter I shall dispute elsewhere.
The Attic talent is half of the Hebrew talent, for it contains six thousand drachms, that is, 60 Attic minas.
The Attic and Roman mina contains a hundred drachms, twenty-five sicles.
The Hebrew mina contains 60 sicles, that is, 240 drachms, 30 ounces, namely two pounds and a half. It is called mina or mna, from the Hebrew mana, that is, he numbered: whence mane, tekel, phares.