Verse 36
36. Water The Spirit and the water, the reality and the symbol, are diffused through the world, refreshing both the moral and the material desert of this earth.
Baptized Baptism was indeed suggested in the very prophecy the eunuch was reading: “So shall he (Messiah) sprinkle many nations,” words which the Ethiopian, son of a distant nation, might feel rightly to include himself. Rightly, therefore, he asks, “What doth hinder ME to be baptized?”
Robinson plausibly decides that this was “a certain water,” as the Greek signifies, “standing along the bottom of the adjacent wady,” [or valley, namely, of Tell el-Hasy.] “This water is on the most direct route from Beit Jibrin to Gaza, on the most southern road from Jerusalem, and in the midst of the country now desert, that is, without villages or fixed habitations. There is no other similar water on this road.” Undoubtedly “many changes” may have occurred in the earth, rendering all such identifications somewhat uncertain; but the entire presumption is that the traveller stands on the very spot where Philip and the eunuch stood!
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