Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| The Sixty Queens: Why Sixty, and Why Queens; The Excellence of the Saints of the First Age. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter
V.—The Sixty Queens: Why Sixty, and Why Queens; The
Excellence of the Saints of the First Age.
In addition to these matters, there is this also
to be considered, so that nothing may escape us of things which are
necessary, why He said that the queens were sixty, and the concubines
eighty, and the virgins so numerous as not to be counted from their
multitude, but the spouse one. And first let us speak of the
sixty. I imagine that He named under the sixty queens, those who
had pleased God from the first-made man in succession to Noah, for this
reason, since these had no need of precepts and laws for their
salvation, the creation of the world in six days being still
recent. For they remembered that in six days God formed the
creation, and those things which were made in paradise; and how man,
receiving a command not to touch2694
2694
This was Eve’s testimony to the serpent, not the original
command.—Tr. [But I do not see the
force of this note. Eve in her innocency is surely a competent
witness.] | the tree of knowledge, ran aground, the
author of evil having led him astray.2695 Thence he gave the symbolical name
of sixty queens to those souls who, from the creation of the world, in
succession chose God as the object of their love, and were almost, so
to speak, the offspring of the first age, and neighbours of the great
six days’ work, from their having been born, as I said,
immediately after the six days. For these had great honour, being
associated with the angels, and often seeing God manifested visibly,
and not in a dream. For consider what confidence Seth had towards
God, and Abel, and Enos, and Enoch, and Methuselah, and Noah, the first
lovers of righteousness, and the first of the first-born children who
are written in heaven,2696 being thought worthy of the kingdom, as
a kind of first-fruits of the plants for salvation, coming out as early
fruit to God. And so much may suffice concerning
these.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|