Saying, Teacher, Moses said, If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up children unto his brother.
Read Chapter 22
Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
Saying, Master, &c. Seed, i.e, posterity, a Song of Solomon , as the Syriac translates, who should be called after the name of the dead, that so the dead man might seem still to survive in him. This law is found in Deuteronomy 25:5.
The Sadducees expected by this question to confound Christ. For if He should say the woman was the wife of one of the men, it would incite the other brothers to wrath, and envy, and perpetual strife, since there was no reason why she should be given to one more than another. For the first husband, who might seem to have had the best right to her, lost his right by death. If, on the other hand, Christ had said that she was the wife in common of all the seven, they would have accused Him as a teacher of shameful doctrine and public incest. It was as though they said, "Such are the absurdities which follow from the doctrine of the Resurrection. Thou therefore, 0 Christ, ought not to assert it. And thus your silly followers imagine, in their stupidity, that y...
Raise up issue to his brother, to be heirs of his name and of his effects, as we read in Ruth, chap. iv, ver. 10: suscitare nomen defuncti to raise up the name of the deceased in his inheritance, lest his name be cut off from among his family, and his brethren, and his people. (Haydock)
Watch him answering these like a deft teacher. For though they deceitfully came to him, yet their question was one of ignorance. Therefore he does not say to them, “You hypocrites.” To avoid censure for the fact that the seven brothers had one wife, they refer to Moses’ authority. However, I believe that their whole story was just a fiction. For the third would not have taken her when he saw the two bridegrooms dead, or if the third, yet not the fourth or the fifth; and if even these, much more the sixth or the seventh would not have come to the woman but have shrunk from her. For such is the custom of the Jews. If they now still have this resistance, how much more did they have it then? They often avoided marrying under these circumstances, even when the law was constraining them. The Gospel of Matthew, Homily
