reluctant and ungracious Deity is to be worked upon by our saying the same thing over and over again (cf. IK 18^®), or by repeating His honours and titles (cf. Ac 19*-'). In the words (b<nrep oi edvcKoi He calls up a picture of those whom His hearers have no desire to resemble (Expositor, 1900 (i. ), 239). 'Pestering the gods with entreaties,' ' dinning into the ears of the gods,' were Roman phrases : thus Tacitus speaks of Galba ' wearying with entreaties the gods of an empire no longer his ' (Hist. i. 29) ; cf. Statins, Thebais, 2. 224, ' Superos in vota fatigant Inachidse' ; Ter. Heaut. v. 1. 6, 'Desiste, inquam, deos obtundere.' Such expres- sions set forth the contrast between Jesus' teaching of the Divine Fatherhood and the low conceptions about God on which the prayers of the heathen were founded, and give point to the precept, ' Be not ye therefore like unto them : for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him' (Mt 68).
That our Lord's prohibition of ^arToXoyla, is not meant to exclude such prolonged and repeated l^rayers as are genuine utterances of love and desire, the impassioned pressing-in of the devout spirit into communion with God, is evident from His enjoining increasing earnestness (Mt 7'"", Lk IP"'^) and persevering importunity (Lk 1P^'-18^"^-) in prayer, as well as from His own example, when He sought relief from the weight and pressure of His work and ' continued all night in prayer to God ' (6^'^), or when He ' offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death' (He 5'^), satisfying the fervour of His feeling of Sonship with the cry, 'Abba, Father,' and returning to His oratory in the depth of the Garden to offer the same prayer as before (Mk 14^^ (Mt 26**) rbv avrbv Xoyov eLTrJjv, 'the same petition,' rather than 'the same words' ; cf. Swete, 327). Our Lord's prayers were the beginning of His ever-continuing inter- cession (Ro 8^, He 7®), and in the one instance reported of a j^rayer of considerable length which He offered as His disciples stood around Him (Jn 17) there is a repetition of the same expres- sions. With respect to the perfect form of words which He taught us in the Lord's Prayer (wh. see), it is by our repeating it often that we come to under- stand its real depth, and how all our requests are to be brought under one or other of its petitions ; and when we have not said it well, we should try to say it better a second or a third time. The true sense of our Lord's saying is set forth in one of Bp. Wilson's ' Maxims of Piety ' : ' The eloquence of prayer consists in our proposing our wants to God in a plain manner' (Maxims, 132), and still better by Hooker in the words, ' The thing which God doth regard is how virtuous our minds are, and not how copious our tongues in prayer ; how well we think, and not how long we talk, when we come to present our supplications before Him ' (Eccles. Pol. V. 32. 1) ; cf. Augustine's letter to Proba, quoted by Trench (Ser. on the Mount, 255).
Literature. — Grotius, Com. on the Gospels ; Expos. Times, xi, xii, ut sup. ; Hatch and Redpath, Concordance to the LXX.
James Donald. VEIL. — ' The veil of the temple Avas rent in twain from the top to the bottom ' Avhen Jesus died (Mt 27^\ Mk 15^^ Lk 2Z*% The Temple is, of course, the Temple of Herod, and the veil is, the 'second veil' (He 9^) which divided the '??'n or Holy Place from the i'?'^ or Holy of Holies. This
VENGEANCE
VENGEANCE
791
is the only reference to the veil of the Temple in the NT, that in Hebrews being to the veil of the Tabernacle. The Greek words are rd KaTawiTaff/xa Tov vaov. In the LXX i'a6s = T3i in Ps 28 (27)- and KaT.—{l) TjDD, the curtain before the door of the Holy Place and before the gate of the fore-court in the Tabernacle ; and (2) nsiB, the curtain between the Holy Place and tlie Holy of Holies (similarly Philo, Vita 3Ioi/sis, in. 5). The Gospel according to the Hebrews, as quoted by Jerome, had in the above passage 'lintel' instead of 'veil' (' superliminare tenipli infinitae magnitudinse fractum esse atque divisum '). It is asserted that in the Temple of Solomon there was no veil, since it is mentioned only in 2 Ch S''* ; but Thenius' emendation of 1 K 6-^ ' drew the veil across witli golden chains ' is good. In the Mishna the veil of the sanctuary is jjresupposed, e.g. in Yoma v. 1, where the mention of the ark shows that the writer is thinking of the Temple of Solomon. Josephus {BJ v. v. 4) men- tions a gorgeously embroidered veil before the hyn, and a second veil, which he does not describe, in front of the t^I of the Temple as he knew it.
A difficulty is occasioned by the fact that there appear to have been in Herod's Temple not one but two veils between the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, each representing? a surface of the wall one cubit thick, which in Solomon's Temple separ- ated the two places. In Yoma v. 1 the high priest on the Day of Atonement leaves the Holy Place by the south end of the outer veil, walks northwards down the cubit space between the two veils, and enters the sanctuary by the north end of the inner veil. This cubit space is in Middoth iv. 7 called j'Dpia, that is, rixpa.41;, because in the first Temple it was filled with the wall, and the builders of the second did not know whether to reckon the space as belonging to the Holy Place or to the Holy of Holies. According to another account, there was only a single veil. In any case the veil would mean the outer one, which alone was visible to any except the priests. The Kaabah in Mecca has also a veil over its door.