sin of the world. Dante places Caiaphas and his father-in-law, Annas, far down in Hell in the Bolgia of the Hypocrites ;
““to mine eyes there rushed One crucified with three stakes on the ground. When me he saw, he writhed himself all over, Blowing into his beard with suspirations ; And the friar Catalan who noticed this, Said to me: ‘This transfixed one whom thou seest, Counselled the Pharisees that it was meet To put one man to torture for the people. Crosswise and naked is he on the path, As thou perceivest ; and he needs must feel, Whoever passes, first how much he weighs; And in like mode his father-in-law is punished Within this moat, and the others of the council, Which for the Jews was a malignant seed.”
“Inferno,” xxiii., 110-122,
Dean Plumptre suggests that the punishment described by the poet seems to reproduce the thought of Isa. li. 23.
50. People—nation (rod Araot—7d e9vos). The former the theocratic nation, the people of God: the latter, the body politic. See on 1 Pet. ii. 9.
52. Nation (€9vovs). John does not used the word Aaos, peo- ple, which Caiaphas had just employed. The Jews were no longer a people, only one of the nations of the world. He wishes to set the Gentiles over against the Jews, and this dis- tinction was national. Moreover, John points out in this word the fact that the work of Christ was not to be for any people as specially chosen of God, but for all nations.
54. Wilderness. The wild hill-country, northeast of Jeru- salem.
Ephraim. The site is uncertain. Commonly taken as Ophrah (1 Sam. xiii. 17), or Hphraim (2 Chron. xiii. 19), and identified with el-Tazyibeh, sixteen miles from Jerusalem, and situated on a hill which commands the Jordan valley.
55-57. xii. 1-11. Compare Matt. xxvi. 6-13; Mark xiv. 3-9.