Letter R

R.

THE BOOK OF KINGS, in Hebrew ספר המלכים Sepher hammelachim, is cited in 2 Paralipomenon, chapter 24. ¹ That this is not that work which is contained under the name of the Four Books of Kings in the sacred Bible, the last period [sentence] of that same chapter shows clearly enough, ² running thus: NOW [concerning] the sons of Joash, and the great sum of money which had been gathered under him, and the repairing of the house of God — these are written more diligently in the book of Kings. Which words certainly cannot be referred to the [canonical] history of Kings; wherein it is so far [otherwise] — that the [things] narrated in the present chapter of Paralipomenon should be related more fully and more exactly — that some [things] are even omitted in it out of those which are here either recorded or at least indicated. This book, therefore, is (as I judge) plainly diverse from the canonical Books of Kings. And the author of the third volume of Esdras seems to feel the same, who, distinguishing this [book] from those by a manifest difference, writes thus in the first chapter of his work: ³ AND these [things] were prescribed [written down before] in the book of the histories of the kings of Judah; and the several deeds and acts of Josiah, and his glory, and his understanding in the law of the Lord; both the [things] done by him, and those which are not written in the book of the Kings of Israel, &c. Now this book is cited both in the two latter volumes of Kings, and in the latter book of Paralipomenon, in almost every chapter, once and again, and with the words of the title a little varied: sometimes it is called the Book of the words, or of the discourses, or of the days of the kings of Judah; sometimes the Book of the discourses of the days of the Kings of Israel; and at times, too, by the joined title of both together, it is called the Book of the Kings of Judah and Israel — in which, by an ampler narration, all and singular the deeds of the Kings of Judah and Israel had been more brilliantly set in order by a most diligent author, whose name no less than [his] work devouring time has consumed, ⁴ leaving only, for the memory of posterity, those [things] which — in the second [book] of Paralipomenon, and in the second and third books of Kings — were gathered into a short compendium by an uncertain abridger, whom some think to be Jeremiah, others Esdras.

THE BILL OF DIVORCE, a book delivered by God to the mother of the Jews, is the execution of the divine reprobation against the Jewish synagogue. Concerning which, of old — when the Jews, on account of [their] nefarious crimes, had been repudiated by God and given into the servitude of barbarous nations — they were wont, by a certain popular kind of complaint, under the parable of a book of divorce, to accuse ⁵ God as fickle, changeable, and least of all consistent with Himself: [complaining] that He had suddenly, with changed purpose of mind, repudiated and cast off the mother and Jewish synagogue joined to Himself in matrimony and most ardently beloved for a long time — and that provoked or challenged by no fault of hers, but out of the sole and mere choice of a new will; after the manner of a carnal man who of his own accord dismisses a wife sought with ardent desire and long kept, for no other cause than that her long and continual companionship and abundance has brought upon him satiety and loathing of the conjugal life. ⁶ which so iniquitous accusations God, clearing Himself through Isaiah, says: WHO is (says He) the book of divorce of your mother, whereby I put her away? For behold, you are sold in your iniquities, and in your crimes have I put away your mother; because I came, and there was no man; I called, and there was none to answer — showing forsooth by these words ⁷ that the occasions and causes of the Hebrew reprobation and repudiation are not to be referred to His own good pleasure of the divine will, but rather to the perfidious ingratitude of the adulterous synagogue, which — the fidelity of the marriage-bed being violated, and the worship of God her spouse cast off — had prostituted herself to the adulterous gods of all nations, and had drawn God, well-nigh unwilling, to the book of divorce by the foulness of her fornications. Which God also, confirming through Jeremiah, says: ⁸ BECAUSE the rebel Israel had committed adultery, I had put her away, and had given her a bill of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also. And again, repeating the same through Hosea, He says: ⁹ JUDGE your mother, judge; for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. And again in Isaiah, upbraiding the children of Israel with the adulteries of [their] shameless mother, He says: ¹⁰ COME hither, you sons of the sorceress, the seed of the adulterer and of the harlot. And a little after, in the same chapter, turning His speech to their mother, He subjoins: ¹¹ UPON a lofty and high mountain you have set your bed, and thither you went up to offer victims; and behind the door and behind the post you have set up your memorial; and beside me you uncovered yourself, and received adulterers; you enlarged your bed, and made a covenant with them; you loved their bed with open hand; and you adorned yourself with royal ointment, and multiplied your perfumes; you sent your messengers far off, and were debased even to hell. By which words God plainly demonstrates ¹² that not without cause, nor out of the mere sentence of His own mind, but out of the ignominy of the Jewish baseness, did He cast off the Synagogue, [which had] deserved ill of Him. For God reprobates no one at all ¹³ unless a fault has first gone before in him; nor is He an avenger before someone is a sinner.

BUT to these [things], which are drawn from those prophets concerning the occasion and cause of the Jewish repudiation and reprobation, the Apostle Paul seems not a little to be at variance — ¹⁴ who, in the Epistle to the Romans, discoursing of this very reprobation of the Jewish nation, refers the cause of this rejection not to the crimes and evil deserts of the Jews, but to the very good pleasure of the divine will so willing it: [a will] which, with no inspection made of human [merits], apart from any inspection of [their] vices or virtues, receives into favor whom it wills and as it wills, and hates, rejects, and repudiates whom it wills and as it wills — even the undeserving. Which sentence indeed fights diametrically with the sayings of the Prophets set down above.

AGAIN, the same Paul, in another place of the same epistle, seems to have utterly taken away not only the [aforesaid] cause of the Jewish reprobation, but even the reprobation itself of the Jewish nation, when he thus spoke: ¹⁵ I SAY then, has God cast off his people? God forbid: for I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not cast off his people, whom he foreknew — as if he should say: He is unchangeable, nor does He any more retract what He once decreed.

SINCE, therefore, according to His eternal prescience He has chosen for Himself the nation of the Hebrews as a peculiar [people], it cannot come to pass that God should repudiate and cast it off — which God Himself also, in Jeremiah, taking an argument from impossibilities, most constantly confirms, in these words: ¹⁶ THUS says the Lord: If the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth beneath be searched out, then also will I cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done. ¹⁷ Thus says the Lord, who gives the Sun for the light of the day, the order of the Moon and of the stars for the light of the night: If these laws shall fail before me, then also shall the seed of Israel fail, so as not to be a nation before me all the days. And, what is even much more admirable, God Himself, through Hosea, affirms that He is so far from the repudiation of the Jewish nation that He even promises to take her to Himself as a perpetual spouse, saying: ¹⁸ I WILL espouse you to myself forever: and I will espouse you to me in justice, and in judgment, and in mercy, and in compassions; and I will espouse you to me in faith. Which words indeed seem most firmly to establish that the Hebrew nation was neither at any time repudiated, nor thereafter to be repudiated.

FOR the solution of this controversy it is needful to know that the divine reprobation, or divorce, is twofold — ¹⁹ namely, eternal and temporal. Eternal divorce ²⁰ is the order and disposition of the divine providence concerning those whom God has foreknown [as] to be excluded forever from the nuptials of the celestial Lamb, and from the fellowship and everlasting fruition of the divine Spouse. Temporal divorce ²¹ is the rejection whereby God, for a time, repudiates certain [persons] — as much of the number of those to be saved as of the number of those to be damned — and temporally excludes and rejects [them] from the participation of His goods, whether spiritual or corporal. Of the temporal casting-off of spiritual goods Jonas complained, when he said: ²² I AM cast away from the sight of your eyes; and David, dreading the same casting-off, was saying: ²³ CAST me not away from your face, and take not your holy Spirit from me. And in another psalm: ²⁴ I said in the excess of my mind, I am cast away from the face of your eyes. Of the divorce from temporal goods the same David says: ²⁵ WHY have you repelled me? and why do I go sorrowful, while the enemy afflicts me? And Jeremiah, in the Lamentations, embracing both divorces — the eternal as well as the temporal — in one sentence, says: ²⁶ THE Lord will not cast off forever; for if he has cast off, he will also have mercy.

SINCE, therefore, the divorce is twofold, of each of them two [things] can be particularly investigated — namely, whether the penalty of each divorce reaches to the whole race of the Jews, and what were the causes of each divorce.

IN THE FIRST place, if we ask whether the whole Jewish nation has been cast off by eternal divorce, ²⁷ Paul answers: God forbid. As if he should say: although out of the Jews an innumerable multitude (as the Prophets everywhere testify) has been repudiated by God with eternal reprobation, yet God forbid that I should believe the whole seed of Israel condemned to the penalty of eternal divorce: for I also am an Israelite, ²⁸ of the tribe of Benjamin; for God has not cast off his people, whom he foreknew. But if anyone should ask whether temporal divorce ²⁹ excludes the whole Jewish multitude from God utterly, or has at some time excluded [it], it must be answered that temporal divorce — as regards the casting-off from the temporal goods which God had granted to the Synagogue as it were a dowry — does comprehend the whole Jewish nation. For God has temporally cast off all — the good as well as the bad, the elect as well as the reprobate ³⁰ — and has cast [them] out of the synagogue, out of the temple, out of the kingdom, and out of the possession of the promised land, into captivity and servitude. But as regards spiritual goods, and the grace of present justice, not all have been repudiated.

IN THE SECOND place, if we desire to know what was the cause why the greater part of the Jews has been cast off by perpetual divorce, ³¹ we ought to consider that, in the whole progress of the Jewish repudiation, certain degrees are prior and eternal, but certain [are] later and temporal — or (what is the same) that in the whole work of that divorce the beginning and the completion are to be regarded. If we consider the beginning, or the prior and eternal degrees — which are hatred, rejection, and repudiation, opposed in a privative manner to love, election, and predestination — Paul answers that the cause why the Jews are cast off eternally is none, save the good pleasure of the divine will; and he proves it by the example of the reprobation of Esau, concerning whom, before he was born or had done anything of evil — not out of foreseen evil works, but out of the choice of His own will — God said: ³² ESAU I have hated; and the elder shall serve the younger. But if we look to the later, temporal degrees, and to the last completion of the eternal repudiation ³³ (which is concluded in eternal damnation), the cause of this final outcome is in the Jews — namely, their incredulity, arrogance, ingratitude, and obstinacy: out of which they have fallen into the damnation of perpetual perdition, God saying to them through Hosea the Prophet: ³⁴ THY perdition [is] from thyself, O Israel; only from me [is] thy help. Which Paul likewise demonstrated when, proposing that question — Why Israel did not deserve to be justified — he said: ³⁵ WHAT then shall we say? that Israel, following the law of justice, is not come unto the law of justice. Wherefore? And answering, he added: ³⁶ Because [it was] not by faith, but as it were by works: for they stumbled at the stumbling-stone, and the rock of scandal — because they did not believe that they could be justified through Christ, who is the rock of offense, against which they, by their own incredulity, dashed themselves: and for that cause they have been repudiated forever.

FINALLY, if it be asked whence [comes] the cause of the temporal divorce of the Jews — ³⁷ that is, why God has dismissed from Himself the Jewish race, and cast off in His fury the whole seed of Israel, and given it for a prey and for a plundering to all the nations — God Himself answers through Jeremiah: ³⁸ Because the rebel Israel has committed adultery, I had dismissed her, and had given her a bill of divorce. And again through Isaiah: ³⁹ In your iniquities are you sold, and in your crimes have I dismissed your mother; because I came, and there was no man; I called, and there was none to hear. The Bridegroom Himself came; He called the adulterous synagogue; He provoked [her] with benefits, invited [her] with blandishments, entreated [her] with prayers, deterred [her] with threats, goaded [her] with scourges, that — the adulterer forsaken — she might return to Him. He sent prayers before, when, speaking out of the mouth of Jeremiah and Hosea, He said: ⁴⁰ IT IS commonly said: If a man dismiss his wife, and she, departing from him, marry another man, shall he return to her any more? but you have fornicated with many lovers: yet return to me, says the Lord, and I will espouse you ⁴¹ to me forever, and in mercy, and in compassions. Threats He added, when He spoke to her — through Hosea, to [her] sons — saying: ⁴² Judge your mother, judge; for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband: let her put away her fornications from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts; lest perhaps I strip her naked, and set her as in the day of her nativity, and make her as a wilderness, and set her as a trackless land, and slay her with thirst; and I will not have mercy on her children, for they are the children of fornication: for their mother has committed fornication. Scourges, finally, He applied, when He afflicted her with various captivities; but when she could by no means be brought — neither by sweet nor by bitter [things] — to forsake the adulterers utterly and to cleave perseveringly to God her Spouse, at length, by the desert of her ingratitude, ⁴³ she was cast off by her Spouse with a temporal divorce, for perpetual time.

THE BILL OF HUMAN DIVORCE, in Hebrew ספר כריתות Sepher cherithuth, but in Greek according to the Seventy interpreters βιβλίον ἀποστασίου, is the book which a husband was bound by law to hand to a wife soon to be dismissed — [the law] which Moses promulgated ⁴⁴ in the twenty-fourth chapter of Deuteronomy in these words: ⁴⁵ IF a man take a wife, and have her, and she find not favor before his eyes on account of some foulness, he shall write a bill of divorce, and shall give it into her hand, and shall send her away out of his house. And when, having departed, she has married another husband, and he also hates her, and has given her a bill of divorce, and has sent her away out of his house, or is indeed dead, the former husband cannot take her again to wife: because she is polluted, and is become abominable before the Lord. Thus Moses. This bill the Rabbis of the Hebrews call גט ghet, because it is, as it were, a witness of the divorce, in which the husband resigns all the right which he had over the wife. Now the Hebrews of our times use, in composing bills of this kind, a certain formula taken out of the book of the precepts of Rabbi Moses of Coucy [de Cozi], in well-nigh these words:

ON THE SIXTH [day] of the week, on the twelfth of the month Adar, in the year from the creation of the world five thousand three hundred and six, in the city of Cremona beside the river Po, in Italy. I, Samuel Carmina, son of Rabbi Daniel Sapharadi, of my own accord, and from [my] heart, and without any compulsion, dismiss from me Rachel, daughter of Rabbi Ezra Tarizol, and grant her license and power to depart at her own discretion, whithersoever it shall seem [good] to her, and that she may be married by any man; nor let anyone presume to hinder her. In testimony whereof I have given her this book of divorce, and the schedule of dismissal, and the seal of divorce, according to the constitution of Moses and of Israel, in the presence of the witnesses subscribed below: Mardochai Gabirol; Helia Chaphet; Manuel Pandin. ⁴⁶

THUS, therefore, the Jews believe that they rightly understand and piously observe the law concerning the bill of divorce, thinking that Moses commanded husbands to dismiss hateful wives for whatsoever cause, and to marry another. But Christ showed ⁴⁷ that this law was not so to be understood, when — the Pharisees asking, in the nineteenth chapter of Matthew, whether it was lawful for a man to dismiss his wife for whatsoever cause — He answered that it was not lawful for a man to separate those whom God had joined into one flesh. And again, when the Pharisees objected that Moses had commanded to give a bill and to dismiss the wife, He straightway added: ⁴⁸ MOSES, for the hardness of your heart, permitted you to dismiss your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, that whosoever shall dismiss his wife, except for fornication, and shall marry another, commits adultery; and he that shall marry her that is dismissed, commits adultery — willing (as Augustine says) to declare by these words that not the whole of this law is a precept, but that one part of it (namely, that which pertains to the divorce) is a permission; but the other, which speaks of the bill of divorce, is a command and a mandate. ⁴⁹ For Moses did not say, Whosoever will, let him dismiss [his] wife — which was contrary to the law of God — but he said, If any man dismiss [her], let him not dismiss [her] except a bill of divorce being first given: so that, forsooth, a delay being interposed, the mind — [otherwise] headlong into discord and separation — being checked by the writing of the bill, might desist, and might consider what an evil it was to dismiss a wife; especially because (as they report) among the Hebrews it was lawful for none ⁵⁰ to write the sacred letters — that is, the Hebrew [letters] — except for the scribes alone, since they professed a more excellent wisdom. To these scribes and judges, therefore — endowed with wisdom and justice — the law sent [the parties], that by their persuasions the husband might be recalled to conjugal concord. But if only such hatred should intervene that it could not be extinguished or amended, then He permitted a divorce to be made, and another to be married — not as something lawful, but ⁵¹ as a remedy prepared for avoiding a greater evil, lest the husband, from weariness and the despair of an inseparable marriage, should turn to the murder of the wife. For it was always an evil to repudiate a wife for whatsoever cause, and to take another — nay, [it is] against the very inseparable nature of matrimony, founded from the beginning of the human race, whose law is: ⁵² Wherefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh. Not, therefore, was it a precept for the Jews to dismiss a wife and to marry another, but only a permission. To us Christians it is neither a precept, nor in any part permitted — Paul saying: ⁵³ TO THOSE who are joined in matrimony I give commandment, not I, but the Lord, that the wife depart not from the husband; but if she depart, that she remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband. ⁵⁴ Albeit a bill of repudiation and of divorce — from the bed and cohabitation only, and in the sole cause of fornication, and to those alone who are free from fornication — is permitted to be given, and is even sometimes just (namely, when the adulteress is incorrigible), lest we fall into that sentence of the proverbs: ⁵⁵ HE WHO holds [retains] an adulteress is foolish and senseless. Augustine treats this argument ⁵⁶ in the first book On the Lord’s sermon on the mount; in the first book of the Retractations, chapter nineteen; and in the nineteenth book against Faustus, chapter twenty-six; but most copiously in the two books On adulterous marriages, to Pollentius — a most religious man, who, moved rather by a certain human commiseration of husbands than by solid reasons, thought it not unlawful for a Christian man, in the cause of fornication, to give a bill of divorce to an adulterous wife and to marry another; lest the unhappy husband, who cannot live continently, should — by the necessity of satisfying human frailty and of having offspring — be compelled to lie with the adulteress, or be driven to slay the adulteress without any mercy, if, she living, it were not lawful for him, according to the laws of the Romans, to marry another wife. Now the ancient Romans permitted ⁵⁷ the divorces of wives with such liberty that, while the republic yet flourished, it was lawful for anyone, and for whatsoever cause (even a hidden one), to cast out a wife by a bill sent [to her]. Whence, when Paulus Aemilius had repudiated his wife Papyria ⁵⁸ — daughter of Musonius, a man of consular rank, with whom he had lived a long time, and out of whom he had raised a most noble offspring, that renowned and greatest Scipio Aemilianus — he would indicate no cause of the divorce, but thought that he abundantly satisfied those inquiring [of him] if, holding out his foot, he answered: This shoe is new, and fair: but none of you knows where it pinches my foot. This so unbridled license of divorces the later Roman Emperors ⁵⁹ (as appears in the fifth book of the Code, title seventeen) restrained with some curbs, laws being published that it should not be lawful for anyone, without open and designated causes, to repudiate his own spouse, nor in any way to expel [her], unless [she were] an adulteress, or a murderess, or a kidnapper, or a poisoner, or a violater of sepulchres, or sacrilegious, or guilty of treason, or liable to some other crime like to these. Now the formula of the bill of divorce, which the Romans concluded in exceedingly brief words, ⁶⁰ was this: PAPYRIA, DAUGHTER OF MUSONIUS, ATTEND TO YOUR OWN AFFAIRS; KEEP YOUR OWN THINGS FOR YOURSELF.

IN OUR times Thomas, Bishop of Gaeta [Cajetan] — the same [being] a presbyter Cardinal — in [his] commentaries on Matthew, and Ambrose, Archbishop of Compsa, in a book separately published on this matter, ⁶¹ have tried to establish by many [arguments] by many arguments that it is lawful for a husband to cast out a wife guilty of adultery, and to take another wife to himself. Whose opinion I leave to be discussed in the sixth book of this work.

RHEUM BEELTHEB [Rehum Beeltheem], whom Josephus calls Rathymus, wrote to Cambyses, king of the Persians, one letter, by which he petitioned that the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem be prohibited. See the first book of Esdras, chapter 4.

THE SENATE AND PEOPLE OF THE ROMANS sent forth various writings in favor of the Jews, ⁶² concerning which these [things] are had in the sacred letters:

A DECREE OF THE SENATE concerning the friendship and alliance entered into with Judas Maccabaeus and the Jews, inscribed on brazen tablets in the Capitol; a copy whereof, sent into Judaea, is had in the first [book] of Maccabees, chapter eight, and in Josephus, in the twelfth book of the Antiquities, chapter seventeen.

A LETTER to Demetrius, king of Syria, that he should not harass the Jews with war. 1 Maccabees 8.

A LETTER written by T. Manlius and Q. Memmius to the senate of the Jews, whereby it is granted to them to live freely according to their ancestral laws. Second [book] of Maccabees, 11.

COMMENDATORY LETTERS to the kings of Europe and Asia, that they should grant a safe return into their homeland to the ambassadors of the Jews sent from Rome by Jonathan. 1 Maccabees, twelve.

A DECREE OF THE SENATE concerning the league and alliance renewed with Simon Maccabaeus, leader of the Jews, engraved on brazen tablets, and kept among the monuments of the Romans; a copy of which Simon set up on brazen tablets in the vestibule of the temple, and laid up the autograph [original] of it in the treasury of Jerusalem. 1 Maccabees 14.

COMMENDATORY LETTERS to the kings and free peoples, that they should permit the ambassadors of Simon Maccabaeus to return safely from Rome into Palestine. 1 Maccabees, fourteen.