XXV.
Deuteronomy 25:1-3. HUMANITY IN PUNISHMENTS.
(1) They shall justify the righteous, and condemn the wicked. — “I will not justify the wicked” (Exodus 23:7). “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord” (Proverbs 17:15). It should be noticed that justify is here used forensically, not meaning to make righteous, but to treat as righteous. Those who object to this sense in St. Paul’s Epistles, will find it hard to put any other sense upon the word in the rest of Holy Scripture.
(2) If the wicked man be worthy to be beaten. — Literally, a son of beating, or of Haccôth, according to the Hebrew. The treatise called Maccôth, in the Talmud, describes the infliction of the punishment in later times, when “of the Jews five times” St. Paul “received forty stripes save one.” The details have been described by Canon Farrar in an appendix to his Life of St. Paul.
Shall cause him to lie down. — The Talmud interprets the position as not sitting nor standing, nor exactly lying, but with the body inclined.
Before his face. — This is interpreted as on the front of his body. The thirty-nine stripes were given thirteen on one shoulder, thirteen on the other, and thirteen on the breast.
(3) Forty stripes. — The Talmud says that they considered first what a man could bear, and flogged him according to their estimate. In some cases, if the whole punishment could not be administered at once, it was divided. It is contemplated as possibly fatal, however.
Lest... thy brother should seem vile unto thee. — The punishment was not considered to be any degradation, after it had been inflicted. It was inflicted in the synagogue, and the law was read mean while from Deuteronomy 28:58-59, with one or two other passages.
(4) Thou shalt not muzzle the ox. — We have a comment on these words from St. Paul in two places (1 Corinthians 9:9, and 1 Timothy 5:18). It is not only written for the sake of the oxen, but to prove that the “labourer is worthy of his hire;” “they that preach the Gospel should live of the Gospel.”