Page:The ancient interpretation of Leviticus XVIII. 18 - Marriage with a deceased wife's sister is lawful.djvu/19

 ἠτυχηκυιας παρέρχεσθαι. "Again, he does not allow the same man to marry two sisters, neither at the same time, nor at different times, even though one should happen to have divorced her whom he first married; for, whilst the first cohabiting with him is still living, even though she be divorced, (and in the latter case) whether she remain in widowhood, or be married to another man, he considered it not pious that the sister should succeed to the place of the unfortunate." Philo then understood the passage of two sisters, and that the prohibition was against marrying a wife's sister as long as the wife was alive. Thus Onkelos and the LXX and Philo give us the mind of the two classes of Jews, the Hebraists and the Hellenists, in the days of the Apostles, and all concur in taking the Hebrew words in a sense favourable to marriage with a deceased wife's sister. Indeed, the Septuagint carries us back 280 years before the Christian Era, and shows how the passage was commonly understood when that translation was made, i.e., before the existence of Pharisees and Sadducees, and proves that the sense of Lev. xviii. 18, adopted by Onkelos and Philo, was not a new one that arose out of Rabbinic tradition, but the ancient interpretation. The unanimity of the authors of the LXX, of Onkelos and Philo, proves it to have been the received opinion of all classes of the Jews in the days of the Apostles, the sense, therefore, of the Jews of that time before they became Christians, and which they would naturally carry over with them into the Christian Church; and therefore the interpretation of the apostolic Church of the circumcision, unless it can be shown that the Lord taught his apostles, or that the apostles taught the Churches over which they presided, a different interpretation. But, in neither the Gospels, nor the Acts, nor yet in the apostolic