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Antiquities of the Jews ... Compiled from Authentic Sources
Antiquities of the Jews Compiled from Authentic Sources Author:William Brown Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: although our Saviour came to abolish the ceremonial and judicial laws, he came to confirm and fulfil that which is moral. SECT. II. The Ceremonial Law. ... more »1st. Taught the Jews the leading doctrines of religion in a sensible and impressive manner. 2d. Served to preserve them from idolatry—by removing that ignorance of God which introduced it—by giving them a full and perfect ritual of their own—by appointing certain marks to distinguish them from idolaters—by restricting most of their rites to particular places, persons, and times—by prohibiting too familiar an intercourse with the heathen nations—and by the positive prohibition of every idolatrous rite. Here the singular laws of the Jews explained, such as sacrificing to devils, making the children pass through the fire to Moloch, using divination, observing times, eating with, or at the blood, seething a kid in its mother's milk, rounding the corners of their heads, and marring the corners of their beards, making cuttings in their flesh for the dead, confounding the distinctive dresses of the sexes, sowing their fields with divers seeds, plowing with an ox and an ass together, allowing cattle of different kinds to gender, using garments of linen and woollen, condemning eunuchism, bringing the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog, to the house of the Lord. 3d. The ceremonial law served to prepare their minds for a brighter dispensation. Reasons assigned for its comparative obscurity. The gradual abolition of the ceremonial law. Some writers on Jewish antiquities have thought that the ceremonial laws were merely arbitrary, and that the reasons of them were only to be sought for in the will of God, which he has not chosen to reveal; making them thereby to differ essentially from the Christian institutions, which are said ...« less