Table Of ContentA C
NCIENT HRISTIAN
C S
OMMENTARY ON CRIPTURE
——————————
OLD TESTAMENT
III
E , L ,
XODUS EVITICUS
N ,
UMBERS
D
EUTERONOMY
EDITED BY
JOSEPH T. LIENHARD, S.J.
IN COLLABORATION WITH
RONNIE J. ROMBS
——————————
GENERAL EDITOR
THOMAS C. ODEN
InterVarsity Press
Downers Grove, Illinois
InterVarsity Press
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©2001 by the Institute of Classical Christian Studies (ICCS), Thomas C. Oden and Joseph T.
Lienhard
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Pericopal headings have been adapted from the New American Bible. Copyright © 1970
Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, D.C. Used with permission. All rights
reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced by any means without
permission in writing from the copyright owner.
Selected excerpts from Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation.
Copyright 1946-. Used by permission of Paulist Press, www.paulistpress.com.
Selected excerpts from Fathers of the Church: A New Translation. Copyright 1947-. Used by
permission of The Catholic University of America Press.
Selected excerpts from Bede: On the Tabernacle, translated with notes and introduction by
Arthur G. Holder. Copyright 1994. Used by permission of Liverpool University Press.
Selected excerpts from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century.
Copyright 1990-. Used by permission of the Augustinian Heritage Institute.
ISBN 0–8308-1473–6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy/edited by Joseph T. Lienhard.
p. cm.—(Ancient Christian commentary on Scripture. Old Testament; 3)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes.
ISBN 0–8308-1473–6 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Bible. O.T. Exodus–Commentaries. 2. Bible. O.T. Leviticus—Commentaries. 3.
Bible. O.T. Numbers—Commentaries. 4. Bible. O.T. Deuteronomy—Commentaries. 5.
Bible. O.T. Pentateuch—Hermeneutics—History—Early church, ca. 30–600. I. Lienhard,
Joseph T. II. Series
BS1225.3 .E96 2001
222’.1077—dc21
2001024408
ANCIENT CHRISTIAN COMMENTARY
PROJECT RESEARCH TEAM
GENERAL EDITOR
Thomas C. Oden
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Christopher A. Hall
OPERATIONS MANAGER
Joel Elowsky
TRANSLATIONS PROJECTS DIRECTOR
Joel Scandrett
RESEARCH AND ACQUISITIONS DIRECTOR
Michael Glerup
EDITORIAL SERVICES DIRECTOR
Warren Calhoun Robertson
ORIGINAL LANGUAGE VERSION DIRECTOR
Konstantin Gavrilkin
GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANTS
Chris Branstetter Susan Kipper
Meesaeng Lee Choi Sergey Kozin
Jeffrey Finch Hsueh-Ming Liao
Steve Finlan Michael Nausner
Patricia Ireland Robert Paul Seesengood
Alexei Khamine Baek-Yong Sung
Vladimir Kharlamov Elena Vishnevskaya
Christian T. Collins Winn
ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT
Judy Cox
CONTENTS
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
A GUIDE TO USING THIS COMMENTARY
ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION TO EXODUS THROUGH DEUTERONOMY
COMMENTARY ON EXODUS
COMMENTARY ON LEVITICUS
COMMENTARY ON NUMBERS
COMMENTARY ON DEUTERONOMY
APPENDIX: EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS AND THE DOCUMENTS CITED
TIMELINE OF PATRISTIC AUTHORS
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A GUIDE TO USING THIS COMMENTARY
Several features have been incorporated into the design of this commentary. The
following comments are intended to assist readers in making full use of this volume.
Pericopes of Scripture
The scriptural text has been divided into pericopes, or passages, usually several verses in
length. Each of these pericopes is given a heading, which appears at the beginning of the
pericope. For example, the first pericope in the commentary on Exodus is ―1:1–7 The
Israelites in Egypt.‖ To see the Scripture passage, click on the highlighted reference, in
this case ―1:1–7.‖ The default version of Scripture with this software is the King James
Version. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) is used in the print version of the Ancient
Christian Commentary on Scripture. The RSV and other versions of Scripture can be
unlocked on this CD-ROM for an additional fee.
Overviews
Following each pericope of text is an overview of the patristic comments on that
pericope. The format of this overview varies within the volumes of this series, depending
on the requirements of the specific book of Scripture. The function of the overview is to
provide a brief summary of all the comments to follow. It tracks a reasonably cohesive
thread of argument among patristic comments, even though they are derived from diverse
sources and generations. Thus the summaries do not proceed chronologically or by verse
sequence. Rather they seek to rehearse the overall course of the patristic comment on that
pericope.
We do not assume that the commentators themselves anticipated or expressed a
formally received cohesive argument but rather that the various arguments tend to flow in
a plausible, recognizable pattern. Modern readers can thus glimpse aspects of continuity
in the flow of diverse exegetical traditions representing various generations and
geographical locations.
Topical Headings
An abundance of varied patristic comment is available for each pericope of these letters.
For this reason we have broken the pericopes into two levels. First is the verse with its
topical heading. The patristic comments are then focused on aspects of each verse, with
topical headings summarizing the essence of the patristic comment by evoking a key
phrase, metaphor or idea. This feature provides a bridge by which modern readers can
enter into the heart of the patristic comment.
Identifying the Patristic Texts
Following the topical heading of each section of comment, the name of the patristic
commentator is given. An English translation of the patristic comment is then provided.
This is immediately followed by the title of the patristic work and the textual reference—
either by book, section and subsection or by book-and-verse references.
The Footnotes
Readers who wish to pursue a deeper investigation of the patristic works cited in this
commentary will find the footnotes especially valuable. Clicking on a footnote number
will cause a box to pop up on the screen, where in addition to other notations
(clarifications or biblical cross references) one will find information on English
translations (where available) and standard original-language editions of the work cited.
An abbreviated citation (normally citing the book, volume and page number) of the work
is provided except in cases where a line-by-line commentary is being quoted, in which
case the biblical references will lead directly to the selection. Clicking on the abbreviated
citation will cause another box to pop up, citing a full description of the source. A key to
the abbreviations is also provided on the ―Abbreviations‖ page of the volume. Where
there is any serious ambiguity or textual problem in the selection, we have tried to reflect
the best available textual tradition.
For the convenience of computer database users the digital database references are
provided to either the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (Greek texts) or to the Cetedoc (Latin
texts) in the bibliography.
ABBREVIATIONS
ACW Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation. Mahwah,
N.J.: Paulist, 1946-.
ANF A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, eds. Ante-Nicene Fathers. 10 vols. Buffalo, N.Y.:
Christian Literature, 1885–1896. Reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
1951–1956; Reprint, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994.
CAA Bede the Venerable. Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. Translated by L.
T. Martin. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1989.
CCL Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1953-.
CGSL Cyril of Alexandria. Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke. Translated by R.
Payne Smith. Studion Publishers, Inc., 1983.
COP John Chrysostom. Six Books on the Priesthood. Translated by Graham Neville.
Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir‘s Seminary Press, 1977.
CS Cistercian Studies. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1973-.
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vienna, 1866-.
CWS Classics of Western Spirituality: A Library of the Great Spiritual Masters.
Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1978-. These volumes are not numbered. Numbers in the
text refer to page numbers in the volume for the appropriate author cited.
FC Fathers of the Church: A New Translation. Washington, D.C.: Catholic
University of America Press, 1947-.
GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte. Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 1897-.
GNLM A. J. Malherbe and E. Ferguson, trans. Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses.
CWS. New York: Paulist, 1978.
GNTIP Ronald E. Heine, trans. Gregory of Nyssa’s Treatise on the Inscriptions of the
Psalms. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
HOG Bede the Venerable. Homilies on the Gospels. Translated by L. T. Martin and D.
Hurst. 2 vols. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1990.
HOP Ephrem the Syrian. Hymns on Paradise. Translated by S. Brock. Crestwood,
N.Y.: St. Vladimir‘s Seminary Press, 1990.
IWG Macarius. Intoxicated with God: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies of Macarius.
Translated by George A. Maloney. Denville, N.J.: Dimension, 1978.
JSSS 2 C. McCarthy, trans. and ed. Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s
Diatessaron: An English Translation of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709. Journal
of Semitic Studies Supplement 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the
University of Manchester, 1993.
LCC J. Baillie et al., eds. The Library of Christian Classics. 26 vols. Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1953–1966.
NPNF P. Schaff et al., eds. A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of
the Christian Church. 2 series (14 vols. each). Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian
Literature, 1887–1894; Reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1952–1956;
Reprint, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994.
OCC Origen. Contra Celsum. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Henry
Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953.
ODI St. John of Damascus. On the Divine Image. Translated by David Anderson.
Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir‘s Seminary Press, 1980.
OEM Rowan A. Green, trans. Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer and
Selected Works. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist, 1979.
OFP Origen. On First Principles. Translated by G. W. Butterworth. London: SPCK,
1936; Reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973.
PDCW Colm Luibheid, trans. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. The Classics of
Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist, 1987.
PG J.-P. Migne, ed. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca. 166 vols. Paris:
Migne, 1857–1886.
PL J.-P. Migne, ed. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina. 221 vols. Paris:
Migne, 1844–1864.
PMFSH George A. Maloney, S.J., trans. and ed. Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual
Homilies and the Great Letter. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York:
Paulist, 1992.
POG Eusebius. The Proof of the Gospel. Translated by W. J. Ferrar. London: SPCK,
1920; Reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1981.
SNTD Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses. Translated by C. J. de Catanzaro.
Classics of Western Spirituality: A Library of the Great Spiritual Masters.
Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1980.
TTH G. Clark, M. Gibson and M. Whithy, eds. Translated Texts for Historians.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1985-.
WSA J. E. Rotelle, ed. Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the Twenty-First
Century. Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1995.
INTRODUCTION TO EXODUS THROUGH DEUTERONOMY
From the first day of its existence, on the first Easter morning, the Christian church had a
Bible—that is, the Jewish Scriptures.1 But Christians did not read these Scriptures the
way the Jews did; they read them in light of what God had done in Jesus the Christ.
Hence Scripture was never to have, for Christians, the absolute authority the Torah had
for Jews. Christ was to be the Christians‘ final authority.2
The earliest Christians, who were converted Jews, found confirmation of their new
faith in these Scriptures.3 The first chapters of the Gospel according to Matthew, for
1 1For these opening pages see Hans von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible,
trans. J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), esp. chap. 3, “The Crisis of the Old Testament
Canon in the Second Century.”
2 2St. Augustine beautifully expresses the conditional authority of the Scriptures for Christians
when, writing of the vision of God, he says, “When that day is at hand, the prophet will not be
read to us, the book of the apostle will not be opened, we shall not require the testimony of
John, we shall have no need of the gospel itself. All Scriptures will be taken out of the way, those
Scriptures that in the night of this world burned like lamps so that we might not remain in
darkness.” Tractates on the Gospel of John 35.9.
3 3The study of early Christian exegesis is best viewed in relation with rabbinic exegesis of the
same period. Christian scholars are increasingly studying rabbinic exegesis, even as Jewish
scholars are increasingly studying patristic exegesis. This volume offers the prospect not only of
enhancing comparative studies of Jewish and Christian exegesis of this period but also, and
perhaps more so, providing new resources for Jewish-Christian dialogue.
example, or the narrative of Jesus‘ passion and death in the Gospel according to John,
quote the Old Testament again and again, with words such as ―so that the Scripture might
be fulfilled.‖
Yet this Bible was not without its problems for Christians. They found in it dozens of
verses that they took as prophecies of Christ, even of single events in his life. But these
verses were only a tiny portion of that Bible. Much of it they considered irrelevant to
them, especially the great bodies of ritual law in the Pentateuch. Other parts they found
valuable: the Psalms quickly became a Christian prayer book; the historical narratives
offered inspiring models of virtue and its rewards or of wrongdoing and its punishment;
the wisdom literature was useful for teaching morality to pagans who wanted to convert
to Christianity; and the prophets often condemned Jewish formalism, as Jesus had done.
But the problem that the Bible posed was not yet solved. To what extent was it God‘s
Word for the new church? Paul had warned the Christians against falling back into
Jewish ways, so some of this Bible, at least, was not to be taken literally.
Three basic approaches to the Jewish Scriptures were open to the early Christians.
Either the Scriptures were law, or they were prophecy, or they were irrelevant. Paul
himself faced up to the problem of the Scriptures most radically: the Scriptures were
indeed law, God‘s law, and as such were good. But the law was temporary and had been
superseded by Christ and by the order of grace. The epistle to the Hebrews represents a
similar pattern: what was repeated and therefore imperfect in the Old Covenant is
fulfilled and accomplished definitively in Christ. The Gospels of Matthew and John, in
contrast, and other early Christian writings such as Justin‘s First Apology, understood the
Old Testament as prophecy. The third possibility, that the Jewish Scriptures were
virtually irrelevant to Christianity, is foreshadowed in several books of the New
Testament in which ―the Scripture‖ is never quoted and is evident in writers like Ignatius
of Antioch.
In the late first and early second centuries, a reversal took place in Christians‘ attitude
to the Scriptures. The first Christians, Jewish converts, had already accepted the
Scriptures and then found in them confirmation of their faith in Christ. Later Christians,
converts from paganism, first accepted faith in Christ and then confronted the mysterious
and often baffling Scriptures. This encounter eventually led to a crisis, and a crisis
precisely of interpretation.
The two most radical solutions to this crisis of interpretation are found in Marcion of
Sinope and in the Epistle of Barnabas, both datable roughly to around the year 140.
Marcion read the Scriptures literally and only literally. Every word of them, he held,
was literally true and only literally true. The God they portrayed was so ignorant that he
had to ask Adam, ―Where are you?‖ This God was so fickle that he first forbade Moses to
make graven images and then told him to make an image of a serpent. He was indecisive;
a mere human being like Moses could talk him into changing his mind. The Scripture
even attested that God could repent. This God could be vicious, too, and order dreadful
slaughters even of women and infants. Marcion drew the only conclusion that was for
him possible: these Scriptures had to be thrown out of the church, for they were unworthy
of the Father of Jesus Christ, the God of love.
The author of the Epistle of Barnabas did the opposite: he read the Jewish Scriptures
only figuratively and concluded that the Jews had never understood them. The covenant,
he theorized, had been valid only from the time Moses received the commandments on
Sinai until he reached the bottom of the mountain and smashed the tablets. Then a wicked
angel came to the Jews and persuaded them to take the Scriptures literally.
Effectively, Marcion read the Bible only literally and threw it out of the church;
Barnabas read the Bible only figuratively and took it away from the synagogue.
But the church expelled Marcion and did not accept Barnabas. Thus it decided to
retain the Jewish Scriptures as its own, with the understanding that those Scriptures had
in some way a double sense. They were literally true: God did show his face to the
patriarchs and speak through the prophets; God did indeed make a covenant with Israel.
But Christ provided the Christians with a new key to understanding the old Scriptures,
and the literal sense could not be the only sense. Read in the light of Christ, the old
Scriptures revealed something more profound.
Irenaeus of Lyons was the first to work out a theory of how the Old and New
Testaments were related. By his time, about 190, it was clear that the church would
indeed have a New Testament—that is, a collection of sacred books written by Christians
and equal in authority to the Jewish Scriptures, which could now be called the Old
Testament (although Irenaeus did not use that term). Irenaeus saw all of saving history as
an ellipse with two foci, Adam and Christ. The two Testaments yielded one great picture:
a beginning in Adam, a fall from grace and a new beginning or recapitulation in Christ.
Thus the theory was in place. But the church still lacked a practical instrument,
namely, a Christian commentary on the Old Testament, book by book. Hippolytus of
Rome, who died in 235, was among the first to try to fill the gap. His commentary on
Daniel, which is extant, is the oldest surviving Christian commentary on any book of the
Old Testament. He wrote some other commentaries, which are mostly lost; perhaps they
were not very useful.
The man who assured the Old Testament its permanent place in the Christian church
was Origen (c. 185–254). He did this by writing an enormous body of commentary and
hundreds of homilies on almost every book of the Old Testament. From Origen‘s time on,
the principles of Christian exegesis of the Old Testament were established, and a library
of commentaries and homilies soon existed and could be consulted. Many interpreters
later disagreed with Origen or even rejected his methods. Yet it is probably impossible to
overestimate his influence on the history of exegesis in the church. The greater part of
Origen‘s work is lost, so it is not always possible—especially in Greek authors—to
discern his influence. Much of what does survive, survives in Latin translations. Ambrose
and Jerome, among many others, depended heavily on Origen, sometimes so heavily that
their explanations of the Scripture were little more than translations of Origen.
Thus, with Irenaeus and Origen, both theory and practice were established. The
Jewish Scriptures were also to be the Christian Old Testament, and their full meaning
was to be seen only in the light shed by Christ. This act of faith—and an act of faith it
was—is enshrined in the Creed of Constantinople (381), in which Christians confess that
―on the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures,‖ and further that the Holy
Spirit ―spoke through the prophets.‖ This latter phrase enshrines the church‘s final
rejection of Marcionism and its affirmation that the one Holy Spirit of God spoke with
one voice in both Testaments.
Theory and practice were established, but a great task lay ahead. The church needed
to ponder God‘s Word, in faith and in hope, and come to an ever fuller understanding of
what indeed the Holy Spirit had said through the prophets.
The Text of the Old Testament
When the Fathers of the church—at least those who spoke Greek and Latin—read the Old
Testament, they read it in translation. The Greek translation is called the Septuagint
(LXX). The name comes from the legend that seventy elders translated (as Jewish versions
have it) the Torah or (as Christian versions have it) the whole Old Testament from
Hebrew into Greek. In the course of the third and second centuries B.C., unknown Jewish
translators did indeed render the Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek, in the first great
translation project in history. In doing so they also transferred their Scriptures into a
different thought world. Concrete Hebrew expressions became abstract Greek concepts.
One of the most fateful—or perhaps providential—translations was that of Exodus 3:14,
where the translators rendered the Hebrew equivalent of ―I am who I am‖ as ―I am he
who is‖ and thus opened the way for Greek speculation on ―being‖ to be predicated of
God. But the translation made a crucial change: while the Greeks spoke of being in the
neuter, the Jewish translators used the masculine gender, implying that while Being was
all the Greeks said it was, it was also what the Greeks could never have imagined,
namely, a person.
Thus the Bible of the early church is preeminently the Septuagint, and Fathers like
Augustine considered the Hebrew text and the Septuagint equally inspired. There are
exceptions, of course, and the Fathers knew of other Greek versions, too, also produced
by Jews. For after the Christians accepted the Septuagint as their Bible, the Jews came to
reject it as too free. The Babylonian Talmud comments, ―It happened that five elders
translated the Pentateuch into Greek for King Ptolemy. That day was as hard for Israel as
the day the calf was made, because the Pentateuch could not be translated properly.‖4
Thereupon Jewish scholars made at least three other translations into Greek, each of them
more literal than the Septuagint, and one at least so literal as to be nearly unintelligible.5
If the Septuagint is an uneven collection of the work of different translators, the so-
called Old Latin translation is even more complex. From the later second century on,
Latin-speaking Christians began to translate the Septuagint—piecemeal, mostly—into
Latin. Some of these translators had not mastered Greek perfectly, and a few had not
quite mastered Latin. Yet much of Latin commentary on the Scripture, up to the fifth
century, was based on the Old Latin, a translation—or better a collection of many
translations—of the Septuagint into Latin.
Latin-speaking Christians themselves acknowledged the problem, and around 384 St.
Jerome undertook a revision of the Latin Bible. What he produced—part of it fresh
translation from Hebrew and Greek, part of it revisions of older translations, other parts
never touched by him— became known as the Vulgate. Only gradually, from the late
fourth century until the ninth, did the Vulgate replace the Old Latin as the standard Bible
in the Latin-speaking West.
Meanwhile the Jews preserved the Hebrew text of the Bible. Some time between the
fifth and the ninth centuries, the Masoretes established a definitive Hebrew text, the one
4 4Massekhet Soferim 1:7.
5 5They are the versions of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, most of which survive only in
fragments, except for Theodotion’s version of Daniel.
on which modern translations such as the Revised Standard Version (RSV) are based. But
to say that the Masoretic text (MT) is always preferable to the Septuagint is too simplistic
and even erroneous. The Septuagint demonstrates, first of all, how ancient Jews
understood the Hebrew text of the Bible. In some cases the Septuagint represents an older
or more primitive version of a book than does the Masoretic text. A glance through the
footnotes in the Revised Standard Version shows that the Masoretic text contains more
than a few problematic passages, and the Revised Standard Version restores the text from
the Greek or other versions.
Practically, for this volume of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, the
conclusion is this: when the Fathers of the church commented on the Bible, they all but
invariably commented on the Septuagint in Greek or the Old Latin or Vulgate in Latin. In
a few cases they are closer to the Hebrew than the Revised Standard Version is; in all
cases they are commenting on their Bible and should be accepted as doing precisely that.
Ancient Commentaries on Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy
The Fathers of the church commented on the Bible in the course of almost all their
writings; it is difficult to find a patristic work that does not contain some citation of
Scripture or some comment on it.
Among the literary genres that dealt specifically with the Scriptures, homilies and
commentaries were the most common, the former the product of the pulpit, the latter the
product of the study. Another genre used in the explication of the Bible, already familiar
to Greek philosophers, was the question-and-response format.6 The number of Fathers
who wrote the equivalent of running commentaries on one or more books of the
Pentateuch is small. And even in these cases, what they wrote was not precisely like
modern commentaries. Concretely, patristic works on the Pentateuch survive from seven
authors, four Latin and three Greek. These works are, almost of necessity, uneven in their
treatment of the text. A thick book of patristic comments on Exodus 12 could be collected
with little difficulty. In contrast, chapters that list names or consist only of detailed ritual
law received little or no comment from the Fathers. The unevenness of the Fathers‘
comments is necessarily reflected in this volume.
First among all the commentators on the Pentateuch was Origen. He wrote a
commentary on Genesis in thirteen books, but this work is lost. He also preached on all
the books of the Pentateuch, but his homilies on Deuteronomy are lost. From Origen we
have sixteen homilies on Genesis, thirteen on Exodus, sixteen on Leviticus and twenty-
eight on Numbers, all in Rufinus of Aquileia‘s Latin translation. Origen preached his
homilies in the course of liturgies of reading and preaching intended for catechumens. A
relatively long portion of a book would be read, the equivalent of two or three modern
chapters, and Origen would comment on a few points from that reading, with the goal of
instructing his hearers in the Christian faith and urging them to live upright lives. By far
the most spectacular among these homilies is the twenty-seventh homily on Numbers, in
which Origen interprets the forty-two stopping places of the Israelites in the desert as the
6 6On this genre see the magisterial survey by Gustave Bardy, “La Littérature Patristique des
‘Quaestiones et Responsiones’ sur l’Écriture Sainte,” Revue Biblique 41 (1932): 210–36, 341–69,
515–37; 42 (1933): 14–30, 211–29, 328–52.
