Moses

"And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying:

Observe for me the times, for comparison with the age of Moses and with the most ancient philosophy of his time.

and, helped by the writings of Moses, he forbade the Romans to make any image of God in the form of man or beast.

For even though Moses, somewhat later, seems the first to have dedicated the God of the world in the temple of his own writings, the birthdays of His recognition are not therefore to be reckoned from the Pentateuch — since the whole pen of Moses does not establish the knowledge of the Creator, but, beginning from the very origin, recounts that He is to be reckoned from Paradise and Adam, not from Egypt and Moses.

But before all the Lycurguses and Solons, Moses and God.

" But the image of the bronze serpent, afterward commanded to Moses by the Lord, pertained not to the title of idolatry, but to the remedying of those who were infested by serpents.

Such too was Moses, rising up with great wrath against those who sinned against God, yet bearing with a gentle soul the slanders against himself.

For it is plain that in the case of those struck we shall observe the rule of Moses;

But Moses was appointed god of the Egyptians, when he who gave the oracle spoke to him thus:

Of all nations there is but one, to which God particularly vouchsafed to give laws, and that was the people of Israel, whom Moses thus addresses in the fourth Chap.

Since then the law given by Moses imposes no direct obligation upon us, as it has been already shown, let us consider whether it has any other use both in this inquiry into the rights of war, and in other questions of the same kind.

In the same manner Moses ordered the people to fight against Amalekites, who attacked them;

Then, leading the people through the desert for forty years with the greatest wonders and divine manifestations, and feeding them with bread from heaven, he gave a law written by God on tablets of stone, which he put into the hands of Moses upon the mountain — a figure and outline of things to come — leading them away from the idols and from all wicked deeds, and teaching them to worship the God w …

and when they had been enslaved to the Egyptian nation and to a certain tyrant Pharaoh, he led them out from thence with signs and dreadful and extraordinary wonders through Moses and Aaron, holy men glorified with the grace of prophecy — through whom he both chastised the Egyptians worthily of their wickedness, and led the Israelites (for so that people, the descendants of Abraham, was called) th …

For the law of Moses, given of old to the Israelites, says:

and that thence too Moses said to the people:

For in this law given to Adam we recognize all the precepts contained which afterwards sprang up, given through Moses — that is:

It seemed best, therefore, that what the chorus of debate had been unable to clarify fully should be examined more carefully, and that questions reconsidered through reading should be settled in writing.

Moses, much more ancient even than Saturn by about nine hundred years — let alone than his great-grandsons — and certainly much more divine, who set forth the descents of the human race from the beginning of the world too, through the several births, by name and by time, sufficiently proving the divinity of the work out of the divination of his utterance.

‘Of every tree,’ He says, ‘you shall eat’;

For the law of Moses too then judges the abortion guilty of retribution, when it is already the case of a man, when there is already reckoned to it a status of life and death, when it is already enrolled even under fate, even though, while still living in the mother, it shares most of its lot with the mother.

Do you not see how Moses, the hierophant of truth, commands that the eunuch and the man with severed parts shall not enter the assembly, and besides these him that is born of a harlot?

but already, through Moses the all-wise, and through Isaiah the lover of truth, and through all the choir of the prophets, he turns to the Word, in more reasonable fashion, those who have ears.

And the truly holy Moses says:

Cui simile est quod in Mosis historia et inde apud Augustinum legimus, iusta bella Israelitas contra Amorrhaeos gessisse, quia innoxius transitus denegabatur;

We read of a similar case in the history of Moses, which we find mentioned also in the writings of Augustine, where the Israelites justly smote with the edge of the sword the Amorites because they had denied the Israelites an innocent passage through their territory, a right which according to the Law of Human Society ought in all justice to have been allowed.

If you have heard meanwhile of one Moses, he is of equal age with the Argive Inachus.

For the first prophet, Moses, who set forth, beginning from the past, the founding of the world and the sprouting of the human race, and presently the avenging force of the flood upon the iniquity of that age, by his prophesying down to his own time, and thereafter through his own affairs, gave forth images of things to come;

To answer the Jews — they too learned to worship the Lord through a man, Moses.

when Moses hides his hand in his bosom and brings it forth as dead, and again puts it in and draws it out alive — does this not portend concerning the whole man?

For commemorating that concerning the resurrection of the dead it is written in Moses, he knew it bodily, in which, namely, the blood of man shall have to be required.

" "Therefore," you say, "the fishes too shall be raised up, and the other beasts and the carnivorous birds, to vomit back those whom they have eaten — since in Moses too you read that blood is required of all the beasts?

"Why then did Moses in the wilderness make a likeness of a serpent out of bronze?

It may seem to be defined in this chapter also concerning military service, which is between dignity and power.

In Exodus, was not that posture of Moses against Amalek, fighting by prayers and persevering until sundown, a late Station?

For as regards fasting, they set against us the days fixed by God, as when in Leviticus the Lord enjoins upon Moses the tenth day of the seventh month, the day of atonement:

For the first people too had carved anew the crime of the first man, being caught more prone to the belly than to God, when, after they had been snatched from the hardness of the Egyptian bondage by the strong hand of God and the lofty arm, and their Lord had been seen, and they were destined for a land flowing with milk and honey, at once, scandalized at the prospect of the unprovisioned wilderne …

you have Moses, God's arbiter from close at hand;

when, in the revelation of his glory, out of so many saints and prophets he chooses to have Moses and Elijah with him, the one a monogamist, the other a eunuch.

for if it was so done from the beginning, we find ourselves directed by Christ to the beginning—as, in the question of divorce, when he says that it was permitted by Moses on account of their hardness, but from the beginning it was not so, he without doubt recalls to the beginning the indivisibility of marriage.

It is said, then, that even that great Moses, whose name for wisdom is greatest among all men, first trained his mind in the learning of the Egyptians, and so came to the contemplation of Him Who Is.

A village magistrate, or the magistrate of a city, is neither a Moses nor a Joshua.

The perpetual combat in his breast between the religion of Calvin, which he was obliged to preach, and that of Moses, which was the only religion he believed, produced a long illness.

Next, He bids him learn the greatness of the Saviour after Him, and the newness of the grace, since indeed, according to the Apostle, the Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ;

‘Master, Moses said, If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife and raise up seed to his brother.

The code of Alfred would not fill twelve [61] pages of the statute book of Massachusetts, and was little or nothing else than a compilation of the laws of Moses, and the Saxon customs, evidently collected from considerations of convenience, rather than enacted on the principle of authority.

But I will appeal also to the original document of Moses, from which the opposite party too tries thanklessly to prop up its suspicions — lest, namely, it should seem not to be instructed from the source from which it ought.

so that the pen of Moses indeed, And darkness over the abyss, and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters, may sound of Matter, but the other Scriptures may demonstrate, scattered here and there, the kinds that were made out of Matter.

And by this they will have the same to be taken both visible and invisible, as the same to be Father and Son — since also a little above, before he denied his face to Moses, it is written that the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as if a man should speak to his friend;

For the rest, how can it be that that almighty God, the invisible, whom no man has seen nor can see, he who dwells in unapproachable light, he who dwells not in things made with hands, at whose sight the earth trembles, the mountains melt like wax, who grasps the whole world in his hand like a nest, to whom heaven is a throne and earth a footstool, in whom is every place, while he is himself not i …

That wood was Christ, remedying from himself the veins of a nature once poisoned and bitter into the most healthful waters, namely of baptism.

from which Aaron was anointed by Moses, whence Christ is named from the chrism, which is the anointing, which lent its name to the Lord, made spiritual, because he was anointed with the Spirit by God the Father, as it is in the Acts:

But let all heretics use the Scriptures of him whose world also they use.

" But to us Moses, a prophetic, not a poetic, shepherd, describes the first woman, Eve, as having girt her parts of shame with leaves rather than her temples with flowers.