sent Me, and to finish His work!' That was His pleasure, His life, His food!

Thus a glorious noonday scene is exhibited to our sight. The disciples bring earthly food, and wished to arrange the meal. But their Master has forgotten thirst, and forgotten hunger, in order to save the soul of a poor woman. And the woman herself has already experienced the mighty influence of His Spirit; she has forgotten Jacob's holy well and her water-pot, and shyness before the people, and even the inclination to palliate her course of life, and hastens to the city to spread the knowledge of Him. Jesus goes on to address the disciples: 'Say ye not, There are yet four months,'1 and then cometh harvest? Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white already to harvest.' They saw the Samaritans coming: that was the harvest which their Master saw commencing, and hailed. Then follows the general remark, that in the spiritual field, the sower and the reaper rejoice together;— the reaper, for he receives his reward, and gains the precious fruit, the souls of men; but also the sower, for the reaper brings the fruit into eternal life, so that in the world of everlasting life the sower can celebrate with him the common spiritual harvest feast. And so it must be, the Lord means to say; for in this relation the proverb, One soweth, and another reapeth, first obtains its full essential verification. The expression is primarily used in reference to earthly relations, to signify the fact, that often one must labour by way of preparation for another, or labour vigorously without his seeing himself the fruit of his labours. But that is in a higher measure true in the spiritual field. Here,

1 If Jesus had not uttered this saying to the disciples nearly about the time of sowing, He must either have used it as a proverb, or probably must have said: Do not you generally say about seed-time, There are four months to harvest, etc.? (see Wieseler, p. 216). The seed-time in Palestine lasted altogether from the end of October to the beginning of February. The harvest began on the plains generally in the middle of April (in the month of Abib), but it was formally opened on the second day of the Passover, therefore on the 16th of Nisan, and lasted till Pentecost. The first reaping was the barley, sown perhaps in November and December, or in part still later, in January. Here the proverb would apply, if they reckoned the intervening months in the gross.'-Lücke, i. 605. The proverbial expression of four months for the time from sowing to harvest is stated from the Jews by Lightfoot and Wetstein, and from Varro by Wetstein.'-BaumgartenCrusius, p. 166.

very often the sowers go very far before the reapers, and die without seeing any fruit. These are the noblest and severest sorrows on earth; herein the whole bitterness of that saying is felt, One soweth, another reapeth.' But the rich eternity, the world of eternal life, equalizes this disproportion. And thus in our case the word is true in the highest sense, He would further say: 'I have sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour; other men have laboured, and ye are entered into their labours. Taken in their connection, we cannot consider these words as having any reference to the later conversions at Samaria (Acts viii. 5); and perhaps some would understand them in the sense that the Lord was now sowing the seed, and that they would one day reap the harvest. But this exposition is not admissible, because Christ would in that case mix two images together-one in which He now was reaping the harvest with His disciples, and the other according to which He, as the sower, preceded them, the reapers. But it is evident, and conformably to the Lord, that He gathers in His harvest with the disciples in living unity. Evidently He is speaking of a harvest to be gathered at the time then present, and His disciples must here regard themselves as generally, after the commission they had received, as the reapers. For these reapers the earlier sources of the seed must now be sought. A sowing certainly had taken place in Samaria, first by means of Moses, whose Pentateuch was in constant use among the people, then by the Jewish priests who had converted the heathen population in Samaria to the rudiments of Judaism; but perhaps, last of all, by John the Baptist, who had baptized at Enon near Salim, at all events not far from this region. If we assume that John the Baptist had kindled afresh in Samaria the expectation of the Messiah, we must regard the expression of Jesus as one of mournful recollection. He who had sown the seed would be rejoicing among the reapers in the eternal life of the other world. This mournful consolation was probable, for John had been apprehended

a short time before in this district. But if we refer the words of Jesus to those oldest sowers of the divine seed in Samaria, they will appear to us in all their sublimity. Jesus is struck with amazment, that that ancient divine seed in Samaria, of which the sowers were hardly known, which seemed to be lost and buried in half-heathenish superstition, should now spring up

suddenly for the harvest; and it testifies to the singular depth, we might say the exalted gratitude, as well as the love of His heart, that at this hour He is mindful of those ancient sowers, and rejoices in their joy to eternal life. In this state of feeling He says, 'More than ever in the present case is that proverb verified.'

The Evangelist informs us that many people of that city believed on Jesus, in consequence of what the woman had communicated to them; how He had exposed to her what she had done; how He had laid before her the register of her criminal life. Hence these persons invited Him to tarry with them, and He abode there two days. For the disciples, this tended decidedly to promote their general philanthropy; it was a preparation for their future universal apostolic ministry. But now many more Samaritans believed on Jesus, and with a very different decisiveness, for they heard His own word; and they declared to the woman that their faith no longer stood on her report, which now seemed to them as insignificant (as λaλia) compared with what they heard from Jesus Himself. They themselves had now heard Him, and knew that this was in truth the Messiah, the Saviour of the world. A quiet blessing rested on that harvest, which the Lord with His disciples had reaped in Samaria. It did not extend over the whole country. Hatred against the Jews formed too great an obstacle (Luke ix. 51). Nor was it the design of Jesus to include Samaria generally in His ministry, since in doing so He might have seriously injured or ruined His ministry in Judea1 (Matt. x. 5). But the harvest was at the same time a sowing which, after the day of Pentecost, ripened into a fresh harvest, and from Sichem came forth one

1 Strauss (i. 537) finds a contradiction between the command excluding the Samaritans in the instructions given by Jesus to His disciples, and His own journey to the Samaritans previously to giving those instructions. But if this connection with the Samaritans be properly estimated, it will rather tend to confirm those instructions. We find that Jesus, in travelling through, only concerned Himself with the Samaritans in consequence of being in their vicinity; that He spent only two days with them, while He devoted the whole time of His ministry to Judea, Galilee, and Perea. Hence it follows that His plan, which His disciples were to follow literally, required the temporary exclusion of Samaria from His ministry, while His spirit contemplated them as called with the rest; and accordingly He attended to the Samaritans when an occasion offered, and in preference to the Gentiles.

of the most distinguished apologists of the ancient Church, Justin Martyr.1

NOTES.

.1. Jacob's 'parcel of ground' is situated on a plain to the east of Sichem (Robinson's Biblical Researches ii. 287). In going from Judea to Galilee this plain is passed through from south to north, and the valley of the city of Sichem, which runs between the mountains Gerizim and Ebal in a north-western direction, is on the left (Robinson, ii. 274). Hence Christ might send His disciples in that direction to the city, and wait for them at the well: by so doing He would remain meanwhile in the ordinary travelling route. This 'parcel of ground' was a constant possession of the children of Israel in North Palestine from the days of Jacob. According to Gen. xxxiii. 19, the patriarch bought it of the children of Hamor. At a later period (Gen. xxxiv.) Simeon and Levi took possession by force of the valley and Sichem, the city of Sichem the son of Hamor. To this event probably the expression in Gen. xlviii. 22 refers, which the Septuagint distinctly explains of Sichem. But perhaps the language of the patriarch is figurative, and means, 'I gained the parcel of ground which I gave to Joseph by my sword and bow; that is, by fair purchase, not by the sword and bow of his violent sons. According to Josh. xxiv. 32, the bones of Joseph were buried here on the conquest of Canaan, and the ground became the inheritance of the sons of Joseph. Abraham himself made the first acquisition of the theocratic race in Canaan, when he purchased the field of Ephron, with the cave in Hebron, for a burial-place (Gen. xxiii.). This was the first possession of Israel in the southern part of the land.

2. On the history of the hatred between the Jews and Samaritans, see Robinson, ii. 289. The religious archives of the Samaritans consist of a peculiar text of the Pentateuch, and 'a

3

1 [See Semisch's monograph on the Life, Writings, and Opinions of Justin Martyr, translated by J. E. Ryland, 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1844: in Clark's Biblical Cabinet.]

2 'I have given thee one portion (D) above thy brethren.'-—A. V. Εγὼ δὲ δίδωμί σοι Σίκιμα ἐξαίρετον ὑπὲρ τοὺς ἀδελφούς σου..-LXX.

3 [On the Samaritan Pentateuch, see Hävernick's Introd. to the Pentateuch 431.-ED.]

sort of chronicle extending from Moses to the time of Alexander Severus, and which, in the period parallel to the book of Joshua, has a strong affinity with that book;' besides 'a curious collection of hymns, discovered by Gesenius in a Samaritan manuscript in England' (Robinson, ii. 299). A knowledge of the religious opinions of the modern Samaritans has been derived from Samaritan letters, which, since the year 1589, have been received at various times in a correspondence carried on between the Samaritans and European scholars. Since the Samaritan religion was only a stagnant form of the ancient Mosaism in traditionary ordinances, which wanted, together with the living spirit of Mosaism, the formative power, the ability of advancing through prophecy to the New Testament, it is not surprising that the expectation of the Messiah among the Samaritans appears only as a stunted copy of its first Mosaic form. With this remark we may set aside what Bruno Bauer (Kritik der evang. Geschichte der Johannes, p. 415) has inferred from the Samaritan letter against the existence of a Messianic expectation among the Samaritans. In the Hatthaheb, whom they designated as their messiah, they could only have expected the appearance of the Deity returning to them. But the hope of an appearance of the Deity, or the transient revelation of an archangel,' must never be confounded with the theocratical expectation of a revelation of the Deity transforming the historical relations of the people. It is in favour of the originality of the Messianic expectation of the Samaritans, that they gave the Messiah a peculiar name. Robinson's Samaritan guide showed him and his fellow-travellers on Mount Gerizim twelve stones, which he said were brought out of Jordan by the Israelites, and added, 'And there they will remain until el-Muhdy (the Guide) shall appear. This,' he said, ' and not the Messiah, is the name they give to the expected Saviour' (ii. 278). BaumgartenCrusius, in his Commentary on John (p. 162), remarks, that he could cite it as the last word of Gesenius on this subject, that he had explained this Messianic name el-Muhdy, the leader, as equivalent to the earlier name Hathaf or Tahef, which, according to the explanation of Gesenius, denotes the restorer of the people in a spiritual and moral sense. In this question, as Von Ammon1 justly remarks, the fact is of great importance, that

1 Die Geschichte des Lebens Jesu i. 354.