The Sadducees
For an account of these see on
Matthew 16:1.
Verse 24. Raise up seed unto his brother.
This law is mentioned
Deuteronomy 25:5. The meaning of the expression is, that the children produced by this marriage should be reckoned in the
genealogy of the
deceased brother, and enjoy his estates. The word
seed should be always translated
children or
posterity. There is a law precisely similar to this among the
Hindoos.
Verse 25. Seven brethren
It is very likely that the Sadducees
increased the number, merely to make the question the more difficult.
Verse 28. Whose wife shall she be of the seven?
The rabbins have said, That if a woman have two husbands in this world, she shall have the
first only restored to her in the world to come.
Sohar. Genes. fol. 24. The question put by these bad men is well suited to the mouth of a
libertine. Those who live
without God in the
world have no
other god than the
world; and those who have not that happiness which comes from the enjoyment of God have no other pleasure than that which comes from the gratification of
sensual appetites. The stream cannot rise higher than the spring: these men, and their
younger brethren,
atheists, deists, and
libertines of all sorts, can form no idea of
heaven as a place of
blessedness, unless they can hope to find in it the
gratification of their
sensual desires. On this very ground Mohammed built his paradise.
Verse 29. Ye do err
Or,
Ye are deceived-by your impure passions:
not knowing the scriptures, which assert the resurrection:-
nor the miraculous power of God (ÄηνδÃ…ναμινÄοÃ… θεοÃ…) by which it is to be effected. In
Avoda Sara, fol. 18,
Sanhedrin, fol. 90, it is said: "These are they which shall have no part in the world to come: Those who say, the Lord did not come from heaven; and those who say, the resurrection cannot be proved out of the law."
Their
deception appeared in their supposing, that if there were a resurrection, men and women were to marry and be given in marriage as in this life; which our Lord shows is not the case: for men and women there shall be like the angels of God, immortal, and free from all human passions, and from those propensities which were to continue with them only during this
present state of existence. There shall be no
death; and consequently no need of marriage to maintain the population of the spiritual world.
Verse 31. Have ye not read
This quotation is taken from
Exodus 3:6,16; and as the
five books of Moses were the only part of Scripture which the
Sadducees acknowledged as Divine, our Lord, by confuting them from those books, proved the second part of his assertion, "Ye are ignorant of those very scriptures which ye profess to hold sacred."
Verse 32. I am the God of Abraham
Let it be observed, that Abraham was dead upwards of 300 years before these words were spoken to Moses: yet
still God calls himself the
God of Abraham,
the dead, (that word being equal, in the sense of the Sadducees, to an
eternal annihilation,) but of the
living; it therefore follows that, if he be the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, these are not
dead, but
alive; alive
with God, though they had ceased, for some hundreds of years, to
exist among mortals. We may see, from this, that our Lord combats and confutes
another opinion of the Sadducees, viz.
that there is neither angel nor spirit; by showing that the
soul is not only immortal, but lives
with God, even
while the
body is detained in the
dust of the
earth, which body is afterwards to be raised to life, and united with its soul by the
miraculous power of God, of which
power they showed themselves to be ignorant when they denied the
possibility of a
resurrection.
