Israel

" It is possible, then, for one who has been educated beforehand to come to the most sovereign wisdom, from which the race of Israel is increased.

in whose fifteenth year Israel was led away to Babylon, and Salmanasar, the king of the Assyrians, removed those in Samaria to the Medes and to Babylon.

He anointed Saul as king, who was the first to reign over Israel after the judges, of whom the whole number, down to Samuel, comes to four hundred and sixty-three years and seven months.

I take upon myself the person of Israel.

From which glory, illumined no otherwise, he departed from Christ than he was wont from the Creator — and so then to smite the eyes of the sons of Israel, just as now those of the blinded Marcion, who did not see that this argument too works against himself.

Now, even though he premised that there were then many lepers in Israel in the days of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed but Naaman the Syrian — surely the number too will not make for a difference of gods, toward the destruction of the Creator remedying one, and the preference of him who cleansed ten.

'But Israel,' it says, 'did not know me.

that Israel was led captive;

here is the wilderness in which the people, sanctified, received the law, and thus, entering into the land of promise, saw God.

God addressing the people of Israel, says, if thou shalt say, “I will place a king over me “ and to Samuel “ Shew them the manner of the king, who shall reign over them.

So the people of Israel under the command of Joshua took up arms in support of the Gibeonites, whom they had subdued.

" For the nations were in tumult in the person of Pilate, and the peoples meditated vain things in the person of Israel.

Asked by His disciples when those things would come to pass which He had meanwhile burst forth concerning the temple's downfall, He sets in order, first, the times of the Jews up to the destruction of Jerusalem, then, of the common things, up to the conclusion of the age.

And He said to me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.

but Israel has not known me.

For the rest, the Jew, Israel, washes daily, because daily he is defiled.

First indeed, when the people, freely set forth from Egypt, escaped the power of the king of Egypt by crossing through the water, the water itself extinguished that king with all his forces.

For the people, having crossed the sea and been carried over into the wilderness for forty years, though they were fed there with divine provisions, nonetheless remembered their belly and gullet rather than God.

Love not gold, in which all the transgressions of the people of Israel are marked.

Thus, then, the condition of the apostles required the precept of flight too, since first it had to be preached to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

"The people ate and drank, and rose up to play.

At the very moment when Samuel was offering the burnt sacrifice—in nothing do we hear God's clemency more procured than by the people's abstinence—and the aliens were bringing on battle, there and then "the Lord thundered with a great voice over the aliens, and they were confounded and fell before Israel;

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 …

So, in short, Israel too observes it.

This is what is reproached to Israel, when the Spirit calls heaven and earth to witness, saying:

Certainly its hands are always unclean, stained for ever with the blood of the prophets and of the Lord himself;

Or is it not manifest that Israel too always sinned against God through impatience?