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| What Was Indicated by the Divine Answer About the Twins Still Shut Up in the Womb of Rebecca Their Mother.
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Chapter 35.—What Was Indicated by
the Divine Answer About the Twins Still Shut Up in the Womb of
Rebecca Their Mother.
Let us now see how the times of the
city of God run on from this point among Abraham’s descendants.
In the time from the first year of Isaac’s life to the
seventieth, when his sons were born, the only memorable thing is,
that when he prayed God that his wife, who was barren, might bear,
and the Lord granted what he sought, and she conceived, the twins
leapt while still enclosed in her womb. And when she was troubled
by this struggle, and
inquired of the Lord, she
received this answer: “Two nations are in thy womb, and two
manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one
people shall overcome the other people, and the elder shall serve
the younger.”953
The
Apostle Paul would have us understand this as a great instance of
grace;954
for the
children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil,
the younger is chosen without any good desert and the elder is
rejected, when beyond doubt, as regards original sin, both were
alike, and as regards actual sin, neither had any. But the plan
of the work on hand does not permit me to speak more fully of this
matter now, and I have said much about it in other works. Only
that saying, “The elder shall serve the younger,” is understood
by our writers, almost without exception, to mean that the elder
people, the Jews, shall serve the younger people, the Christians.
And truly, although this might seem to be fulfilled in the Idumean
nation, which was born of the elder (who had two names, being
called both Esau and Edom, whence the name Idumeans), because it
was afterwards to be overcome by the people which sprang from the
younger, that is, by the Israelites, and was to become subject to
them; yet it is more suitable to believe that, when it was said,
“The one people shall overcome the other people, and the elder
shall serve the younger,” that prophecy meant some greater thing;
and what is that except what is evidently fulfilled in the Jews and
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