ing the promise to them, even in the persons of their descend ants, which was a proof that these patriarchs had not in their own lifetime themselves obtained the promises. And tlms, as we are told in Luke xx. 37, EVEN, KAI, Moses showed the resur rection of the dead, even Moses, not only the prophets, in pre ference to whom, Moses was read publicly before the time of Antiochus.1 At the same time, our Lord reduces to its proper shape the proverb of the Jews, who said, " God is not the God of the living but of the dead." See Axiom ix. of Alexander Morus, and the Dissertation of E. F. Cobius, on the force of this passage.
35. E% l£ avruv, one of them) This man is less blamed by our Lord ; wherefore he seems to have been led on by others. — vofj.ix.bg, a lawyer) How great soever he was, and proud of that abundance of knowledge which he was now about to exhibit. —
1 Hartwell Home says, " The third part of the synagogue service was the Reading of the Scriptures, which included the reading of the whole law of Moses, and portions of the Prophets, and the Hagiographa or holy writings. (1.) The Law was divided into fifty-three, according to the Masorets, or, according to others, fifty-four Paraschioth or sections : for the Jewish year consisted of twelve lunar months, alternately of twenty-nine or thirty days, that is of fifty weeks •'nd four days. The Jews, therefore, in their division of the law into Paraschioth or sections, had a respect to their intercalary year, which was every second or third, and consisted of thirteen months ; so that the whole law was read over this year, allotting one Parascha or section to every Sabbath ; and in common years they reduced the fifty-three or fifty- four sections to the number of the fifty Sabbaths, by reading two shorter ones together, as often as there was occasion. They began the course of reading on the first Sabbath after the Feast of Tabernacles ; or rather, indeed, on the Sabbath-day before that, when they finished the last course of read ing, they also made a beginning of the new course ; that so, as the rabbies say, the devil might not accuse them to God of being weary of reading His law. (2.) The portions selected out of the Prophetical writings are termed Haphtoroth. When Antiochus Epiphanes conquered the Jews, about the year 163 before the Christian sera, he prohibited the public reading of the Law in the synagogues on pain of death. The Jews, in order that they might not be wholly deprived of the Word of God, selected from other parts of the Sacred Writings fifty-four portions, which were termed IIAPHTORAS rniissn (HePHTORoTH), from "-E (PoToR), he dismissed, let loose, opened — for though the Law was dismissed from their synagogues, and was closed to them by the edict of this persecuting king, yet the prophetic writings, not being under the interdict, were left open ; and therefore they used them in place of the others." — (I. B.)