Verse 21
21. The Lord make thee… an oath So signal a mark of Jehovah’s wrath was she to bear, that in future adjurations she was to be held up as the conspicuous example and measure of his vengeance, and the imprecation was to be, “May I become like this accursed woman!”
Make thy thigh to rot Hebrew, to fall.
Belly to swell Greek, to be burnt. The precise nature of the punishment here threatened is more clearly gathered from the original. The thigh is a euphemism for the sexual organs.
Genesis 46:26. Hence the painful infliction, the falling of the womb, attended by an inflammation, which, in the Septuagint, is rendered by the word burn. Michaelis suggests that an ovarian tumour, with its dreadful suffering and emaciation, is here denounced as the penalty. Josephus calls it the ordinary dropsy. Theodoret says, “The punishment shall come from the same source as the sin.” See Romans 6:19. The instrument of the momentary sin shall be the channel through which the penal pain shall be poured during all the life of the convicted adulteress. Verily, “the way of the transgressor is hard.”
Be the first to react on this!
