All unclean persons to be

CHAP. V.

put out of the camp.

CHAPTER V.

The Israelites are commanded to purify the camp by excluding all lepers, and all diseased and unclean persons, 1-3. They do so, 4. Law concerning him who has defrauded another—he shall confess his sin, restore the principal, and add besides one fifth of its value, 5-7. If he have no kinsman to whom the recompense can be made, it shall be given unto the Lord, 8. All the holy things offered to the Lord shall be the priest's portion, 9, 10. The law concerning jealousy, 11-14. The suspected woman's offering, 15. She is to be brought before the Lord, 16. The priest shall take holy water, and put it in dust from the floor of the tabernacle, 17. Shall put the offering in her hand, and adjure her, 18-20. The form of the oath, 21, 22; which is to be written on a book, blotted out in the bitter waters, and these the suspected person shall be obliged to drink, 23, 24. The jealousy-offering shall be waved before the Lord, 25, 26. The effect which shall be produced if the suspected person be guilty, 27. The effect if not guilty, 28. pitulation, with the purpose and design of the law, 29, 30.

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An. Exod. Isr. 2.
Ijar or Zif.

AN AND the LORD spake unto 4 And the children of Israel Moses, saying, did so, and put them out without Ijar or Zif. 2 Command the children of the camp: as the LORD spake Israel, that they put out of the camp every unto Moses, so did the children of Israel. a leper, and every one that hath an issue, and 5 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, whosoever is defiled by the dead: 6 Speak unto the children of Israel, When 3 Both male and female shall ye put out, a man or woman shall commit any sin that without the camp shall ye put them; that they men commit, to do a trespass against the defile not their camps, in the midst whereof LORD, and that person be guilty; I dwell.

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7 Then they shall confess their sin which

a Lev. xiii. 3, 46; chap. xii. 14.- b Lev. xv. 2.- - Lev. xxi. Lev. xxvi. 11, 12; 2 Cor. vi. 16. Lev. vi. 2, 3.- Lev. 1; chap. ix. 6, 10; xix. 11, 13; xxxi. 19. v. 5; xxvi. 40; Josh. vii. 19.

NOTES ON CHAP. V.

from the way of truth, he is abandoned by all; finding Verse 2. Put out of the camp every leper] Ac- his case desperate, he plunges yet deeper into the cording to the preceding plan, it is sufficiently evi-mire of sin, and the man who, with tender treatment, dent that each camp had a space behind it, and on one side, whither the infected might be removed, and where probably convenient places were erected for the accommodation of the infected; for we cannot suppose that they were driven out into the naked wilderness. . But the expulsion mentioned here was founded, 1. On a purely physical reason, viz., the diseases were contagious, and therefore there was a necessity of putting those afflicted by them apart, that the infection might not be communicated. 2. There was also a spiritual reason; the camp was the habitation of God, and nothing impure should be permitted to remain where he dwelt. 3. The camp was an emblem of the Church, where nothing that is defiled should enter, and in which nothing that is unholy should be tolerated. All lepers-all persevering impenitent sinners, should be driven from the sacred pale, nor should any such ever be permitted to enter.

Verse 4. And the children of Israel-put them out] This is the earliest account we have of such separations; and probably this ordinance gave the first idea of a hospital, where all those who are afflicted with contagious disorders are put into particular wards, under medical treatment. Though no mention be made of the situation, circumstances, &c., of those expelled persons, we may certainly infer that they were treated with that humanity which their distressed state required. Though sinners must be separated from the Church of God, yet they should be treated with affectionate regard, because they may be reclaimed. It is too often the case when a man backslides

might have been reclaimed, becomes incurably hardened. One class says, he cannot finally fall, and shall in due time be restored; another class says, he may finally fall and utterly perish. If the unfortunate person be restored, his recovery is taken as a proof of the first doctrine; if he be not, his wretched end is considered a proof of the second. In the first case the person himself may presume on his restoration as a point infallibly determined in the Divine counsel; or in the second, he may consider his case hopeless, and so abandon himself to profligacy and desperation. Thus both parties leave him, and both opinions (misunderstood certainly) render him secure or desperate; and in either case totally inactive in behalf of his own soul. Who is he that properly estimates the worth of one immortal spirit? He who does will at once feel that, in a state of probation, any man may fall through sin, and any sinner may be renewed again unto repentance, through the infinitely meritorious sacrifice, and all powerfully efficacious grace, of Christ. This truth properly felt equally precludes both presumption and despair, and will induce the followers of God to be active in preserving those who have escaped from the corruption that is in the world, and make them diligent to recover those who have turned back to earth and sin.

Verse 7. Shall confess their sin] Without confession or acknowledgment of sin, there was no hope of mercy held out.

He shall recompense] For without restitution, in every possible case, God will not forgive the iniquity

shall meal; he shall pour no oil upon with it, nor put frankincense thereon; An. Exod. Isr. 2. for it is an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial, " bringing iniquity to remembrance.

The bitter waters of jealousy,

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An. Exod. Isr. 2.
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shall go into thy bowels, to water, then it shall come to pass, An. Exod. Isr. 2. make thy belly to swell, and thy that, if she be defiled, and have ljar or Zif. thigh to rot: "And the woman done trespass against her husshall say, Amen, amen. band, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people.

23 And the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out with the bitter water:

24 And he shall cause the woman to drink the bitter water that causeth the curse: and the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter.

25 Then the priest shall take the jealousyoffering out of the woman's hand, and shall ▾ wave the offering before the LORD, and offer it upon the altar:

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26 And the priest shall take .a handful of the offering, even the memorial thereof, and burn it upon the altar, and afterward shall cause the woman to drink the water.

28 And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed.

29 This is the law of jealousies, when a wife goeth aside to another Y instead of her husband, and is defiled;

30 Or when the spirit of jealousy cometh upon him, and he be jealous over his wife, and shall set the woman before the LORD, and the priest shall execute upon her all this law. 31 Then shall the man be guiltless from ini

27 And when he hath made her to drink the quity, and this woman shall bear her iniquity.

t Psa. cix. 18. w Lev. ii. 2, 9.

xxiv. 9; xxix. 18, 22; xlii. 18; Zech. viii. 13.- Ver. 19. z Lev. xx. 17, 19, 20.

u Deut. xxvii. 15. Lev. viii. 27. Deut. xxviii. 37; Psa. lxxxiii. 9, 11; Jer. What is meant by these expressions cannot be easily jealousy was omitted after the Babylonish captivity, ascertained. lanpel yarech signifies literally because adulteries were so frequent amongst them, thy thigh to fall. As the thigh, feet, &c., were used that they were afraid of having the name of the Lord among the Hebrews delicately to express the parts profaned by being so frequently appealed to! This which nature conceals, (see Gen. xlvi. 26,) the ex- is a most humiliating confession. Though," says pression here is probably to be understood in this pious Bishop Wilson, "this judgment is not executed sense; and the falling down of the thigh here must now on adulteresses, yet they have reason from this mean something similar to the prolapsus uteri, or fall- to conclude that a more terrible vengeance will await ing down of the womb, which might be a natural effect them hereafter without a bitter repentance; these beof the preternatural distension of the abdomen. In ing only a shadow of heavenly things, i. e., of what the Gospel requires of its professors, viz., a strict purity, or a severe repentance." The pious bishop would not preclude the necessity of pardon through the blood of the cross, for without this the severest repentance would be of no avail.

1 Cor. xi. 29, St. Paul seems to allude to the case of the guilty woman drinking the bitter cursed waters that caused her destruction: He who eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh ́damnation (кpiμa, condemnation or judgment) to himself; and there is probably a reference to the same thing in Psalm cix. 18, and in Dan. ix. 11.

And the woman shall say, Amen, amen.] This is the first place where this word occurs in the common form of a concluding wish in prayer. The root aman signifies to be steady, true, permanent. And in prayer it signifies let it be so-make it steady-let it be ratified. Some have supposed that it is composed of the initial letters of Adonai Melech Neeman, My Lord the faithful King, but this derivation is both far-fetched and unnecessary,

Verse 23. The priest shall write these curses and he shall blot them out] It appears that the curses which were written down with a kind of ink prepared for the purpose, as some of the rabbins think, without any calx of iron or other material that could make a permanent dye, were washed off the parchment into the water which the woman was obliged to drink, so that she drank the very words of the execration. The ink used in the East is almost all of this kind-a wet sponge will completely efface the finest of their writings. The rabbins say that the trial by the waters of

Verse 24. The bitter water that causeth the curse] Though the rabbins think that the priest put some bitter substance in the water, yet, as nothing of the kind is intimated by Moses, we may consider the word as used here metaphorically for affliction, death, &c. These waters were afflicting and deadly to her who drank them, being guilty. In this sense afflictions are said to be bitter, Isa. xxxviii. 17; so also is death, 1 Sam. xv. 32; Eccles. vii. 26.

Verse 29. This is the law of jealousies] And this is the most singular law in the whole Pentateuch a law that seems to have been copied by almost all the nations of the earth, whether civilized or barbarian, as we find that similar modes of trial for suspected offences were used when complete evidence was wanting to convict; and where it was expected that the object of their worship would interfere for the sake of justice, in order that the guilty should be brought For to punishment, and the innocent be cleared. general information on this head see at the end of this chapter.

Verse 31. This woman shall bear her iniquity]

General account of the

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trial by ordeal. That is, her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot; | gate of the court of Israel, where she was stripped of see on ver. 22. But if not guilty after such a trial, the clothes she wore, and dressed in black before a she had great honour; and, according to the rabbins, number of persons of her own sex. The priest then became strong, healthy, and fruitful; for if she was told her that if she knew herself to be innocent she before barren, she now began to bear children; if be- had no evil to apprehend; but if she were guilty, she fore she had only daughters, she now began to have might expect to suffer all that the law threatened; to sons; if before she had hard travail, she now had which she answered, Amen, amen. easy; in a word, she was blessed in her body, her soul, and her substance: so shall it be done unto the holy and faithful woman, for such the Lord delighteth to honour; see 1 Tim. ii. 15.

ON the principal subject of this chapter, I shall here introduce a short account of the trial by ordeal, as practised in different parts of the world, and which is supposed to have taken its origin from the waters of jealousy.

The priest then wrote the words of the law upon a piece of vellum, with ink that had no vitriol in it, that it might be the more easily blotted out. The words written on the vellum were, according to the rabbins, the following:

"If a strange man have not come near thee, and thou art not polluted by forsaking the bed of thy husband, these bitter waters which I have cursed will not hurt thee: but if thou have gone astray from thy husband, and have polluted thyself by coming near to another The trial by what was afterwards called ORDEAL is man, may thou be accursed of the Lord, and become certainly of very remote antiquity, and was evidently an example for all his people; may thy thigh rot, and of Divine appointment. In this place we have an in-thy belly swell till it burst! may these cursed waters stitution relative to a mode of trial precisely of that enter into thy belly, and, being swelled therewith, may kind which among our ancestors was called ordeal; thy thigh putrefy!" and from this all similar trials in Asia, Africa, and Europe, have very probably derived their origin.

After this the priest took a new pitcher, filled it with water out of the brazen bason that was near the Ordeal, Latin, ordalium, is, according to Verstegan, altar of burnt-offering, cast some dust into it taken from the Saxon opdæi, ordal and ordel, and is derived from the pavement of the temple, mingled something by some from on, great, and DÆL, judgment, signify-bitter, as wormwood, with it, and having read the ing the greatest, most solemn, and decisive mode of curses above mentioned to the woman, and received judgment.-Hickes. Others derive it from the Fran- her answer of Amen, he scraped off the curses from cic or Teutonic Urdela, which signifies simply to judge. the vellum into the pitcher of water. During this time But Lye, in his Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, derives the another priest tore her clothes as low as her bosom, term from on, which is often in Anglo-Saxon, a pri- made her head bare, untied the tresses of her hair, vative particle, and dæi, distinction or difference; and fastened her torn clothes with a girdle below her hence applied to that kind of judgment in which there breasts, and presented her with the tenth part of an was no respect of persons, but every one had absolute ephah, or about three pints of barley-meal, which was justice done him, as the decision of the business was in a frying pan, without oil or incense. supposed to belong to GoD alone. It always signified an appeal to the immediate interposition of GoD, and was therefore called Judicium Dei, God's Judgment; and we may naturally suppose was never resorted to but in very important cases, where persons accused of great crimes protested their innocence, and there was no sufficient evidence by which they could be cleared from the accusation, or proved to be guilty of the crime Jaid to their charge. Such were the cases of jealousy referred to in this chapter.

The other priest, who had prepared the waters of jealousy, then gave them to be drank by the accused person, and as soon as she had swallowed them, he put the pan with the meal in it into her hand, This was waved before the Lord, and a part of it thrown into the fire of the altar. If the woman was innocent, she returned with her husband; and the waters, instead of incommoding her, made her more healthy and fruitful than ever: if on the contrary she were guilty, she was seen immediately to grow pale, her eyes started out of her head, and, lest the temple should be

instantly with all the ignominious circumstances related in the curses, which the rabbins say had the same effect on him with whom she had been criminal, though he were absent and at a distance. They add, however, that if the husband himself had been guilty with another woman, then the waters had no bad effect even on his criminal wife; as in that case the transgression on the one part was, in a certain sense, balanced by the transgression on the other.

The rabbins who have commented on this text give us the following information: When any man, prompt-defiled with her death, she was carried out, and died ed by the spirit of jealousy, suspected his wife to have committed adultery, he brought her first before the judges, and accused her of the crime; but as she asserted her innocency, and refused to acknowledge herself guilty, and as he had no witnesses to produce, he required that she should be sentenced to drink the waters of bitterness which the law had appointed; that God, by this means, might discover what she wished to conceal. After the judges had heard the accusation and the denial, the man and his wife were both There is no instance in the Scriptures of this kind of sent to Jerusalem, to appear before the Sanhedrin, ordeal having ever been resorted to; and probably it who were the sole judges in such matters. The rab-never was during the purer times of the Hebrew rebins say that the judges of the Sanhedrin, at first en- public. God had rendered himself so terrible by his deavoured with threatenings to confound the woman, and cause her to confess her crime; when she still persisted in her innocence, she was led to the eastern

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judgments, that no person would dare to appeal to this mode of trial who was conscious of her guilt; and in case of simple adultery, where the matter was either

CHAP. V.
trial by ordeal.
Grotius gives many instances of water ordeal in
Bithynia, Sardinia, and other places. Different spe-

But other ancient nations have also had their trials cies of fire and water ordeal are said to have prevailed by ordeal.