Толкование на группу стихов: Сир: 14: 22-22
THE TRUE MEANING OF THE SCRIPTURES. ORIGEN: The last story that is related in the book of Numbers is the one in which the Lord commands Moses “to give orders to the children of Israel,” that when “they have entered the holy land” they may know how to take possession of its inheritance and that they should observe the boundaries of their limits in these things. And after this, with the Lord now describing this, it is said, “toward Africa,” that is, toward the west, the boundary of that place should be observed, and of that place toward the east, and thus the Lord indicates through the four regions of the sky certain names that the people of God ought to keep in that earthly Judea.
Thus one of the more simple hearers will say that here there are things that are necessary and useful even according to the letter, in that no one should go beyond the borders that have been appointed through the Lord’s command and one tribe should not dare to violate the boundaries of another. And what will we do when no possibility remains for the Jews, not merely to invade the borders of another nation in these lands but even of possessing them at all? For they have been banished from that land, they are exiles and refugees, and those who now possess and guard the boundaries are not those whom the divine law appointed but those whom they have entrusted the rights of victors. What, I ask, will we do, who read these things in the church? If we read them according to the sense of the Jews, they will seem superfluous to us and pointless.
But I am one who reads what is written about Wisdom: “I went out after her as a tracker.” I want to go out after her, and since I do not find her in the physical realities, I desire to pursue her tracks and investigate where she is going and to see into which rooms she leads my understanding. For I think that if I am able to follow her with care and to investigate her ways, she will give me some opportunities from the Scriptures to understand how it is, even in these passages we need to explain, if we believe what Paul says in a mystery, that those who serve through the law are serving “the shadow and image of heavenly things.” And if, no less in accordance with the judgment of that man, the law, of which this reading that we have in hand is a portion, “contains a shadow of the good things to come,” it seems logical and necessary that everything that is described in the law, as it were concerning earthly things, is a shadow of the good things of heaven; and the whole inheritance of that land, which is called the “holy land” and the “good land,” is an image of the good things of heaven. These things, as we have said, that are mentioned as good things on earth contain a shadow and an image of these. HOMILIES ON NUMBERS 28.1.1-2.
