Lord the portion; sell all; tithes as wages; sin-offerings type Christ; Levite cities begin

Cyril: …says Lord.’ And indeed the Savior, to someone having come forward sometime and asked how he might have the eternal life, ‘You know the commands,’ he says, ‘the, You will not murder, You will not commit adultery, You will not steal,’ (Matthew 19:16–21) and the kin things. And with him having said openly that he would become a keeper of such, and asking and having added the, What do I still lack? ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your belongings, and give to poor, and you will have treasure in heavens, and come, follow me.’ (Psalm 37:4) So then necessity for those willing to liturgize for God undistractedly, and thinking they must follow him, to depart from the earthly things, and to make him alone a lot, and to be fattened by the hope unto him, according to the sung in Psalms: ‘Delight in the Lord, and hope upon him, and he himself will do.’ (Matthew 6:25–33) So then he marks off the tenths for the Levites, unto a counter-gift of the labor of their liturgy. For not without wage is the labor for the saints, but exceptional the honors, and manifest the prizes. ‘For do not care,’ says the Savior, ‘for your soul, what you should eat, and for the body what you should put on; but seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and these all will be added for you.’ (1 Peter 2:9) And again he names sins, the things slaughtered over sins. And these also would be types of Christ, the one sacrificed through us, and having endured the slaughter, in order that he might abolish the sin of the world, and edible only for the sacred-workers the things over the sin. For it would not be fitting for unholy souls the needing to share the holy body of Christ, but for the chosen-out and pure, for whom one might cry the, ‘And you a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people unto acquisition.’ (Numbers 35:1–3) And there have been marked off for those ordered unto the liturgizing, both the arm and the jaws, and indeed also the fourth-stomach; for there must be in the chosen-out race the practical and energetic; and this is the arm; and indeed also word, clear that the teaching, of which a type the jaws; and still also the fourth-stomach, through which the fruit-bearing is very well signaled. Or must not the one truly also known to God be practical and most eloquent, and indeed also most generative?

Palladius: Very much.

Cyril: So then he was making the Levitical race without-lot, and giving himself to it as the exceptional lot. Yet at least seeming to have been set altogether outside the others, through taking nothing at all, he was not releasing usefully; but he was measuring as it were the matter, having given a short something unto necessary enjoyment; for it has been written thus: ‘And the Lord spoke toward Moses upon west of Moab beside the Jordan, opposite Jericho, saying: Arrange for your sons of Israel, and they will give to the Levites from the lots of their possession cities to dwell, and the suburbs of the cities in a circle of them they will give to the Levites; and the cities will be for them to dwell, and their marked-offs will be’