Verse 8
8. Let us Paul, perhaps, reverts here to the first person from delicacy.
Fornication Any illicit sexual connexion. This caution well follows next after that against idolatry; for the idol rites consisted largely of debauchery, as is illustrated by the case to which Paul now refers.
Committed While the Israelites yet sojourned on the east side of the Jordan, the Moabite women first invited them to their sacrificial banquets, and thereby seduced them to whoredom. Numbers 25:0. The worship of the Corinthian Venus was of precisely the same kind; in which debauchery was consecrated as a religious rite. How liable the Corinthian Christians were to that sort of seduction the case of the incestuous man indicates.
Three and twenty thousand The Old Testament (Numbers 25:9) says, four and twenty thousand. Scholars generally admit that Paul wrote as this present text stands; and many, as Alford and Kling, treat it as a failure of apostolic memory. Alford considers it discreditable to maintain any other view. Grotius reconciles the contradiction by supposing that the twenty-three thousand were slain by the plague and one thousand by Phinehas and his fellows. Wordsworth supposes that Paul gives the number who fell in the single day, while Numbers gives all that fell in consequence of the crime. Bengel supposes, that both accounts giving only the round numbers, the exact count might be between the two, and so both numbers be equally correct. Of course no moral truth is affected by the variance.
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