Edom refuses passage; Israel turns aside; no spite; forty stripes

Cyril: …a part of your borders. We will pass through your land; we will not go through fields, nor through vineyards, nor will we drink water from your cistern; by a royal way we will go; we will not turn aside right or left, until we pass your borders. And Edom said to him: You will not go through me; and if not, in war I will go out unto meeting you. And the sons of Israel say to him: Beside the mountain we will pass; and if I and my beasts should drink of your water, I will give you a price; But the matter is nothing; beside the mountain we will pass. And he said: You will not go through me. And Edom went out unto meeting him in a heavy crowd, and in a strong hand. And Edom did not wish to give Israel to pass through his borders, and Israel turned aside from him.’ You hear how those from the blood of Israel, usefully counting out the miseries in Egypt, and composing above and below the modes of the grasping, urbanely ask the favor that wrongs nothing, all but being eager to make the one of like race a fellow-helper—for they were brothers of Jacob from Esau; and the others, though it was necessary to pity, and to allow them to do what they would know useful and beneficial for them, hard and unsoftened and not knowing how to suffer-with, were convicted through the matters themselves; for they shut them out from a way, though the people said clearly that they would damage neither vineyards nor the good fruits of fields anywhere, but would also draw water not without silver. And he, if they should not wish to withdraw from the things asked, not only threatened the attack, but was already also in arms, and with the whole army was arrayed. And what then toward this? Israel was stronger than smallness of soul; for he turned aside from him, it says, pushing away the quarrelsome toward brothers, and having honored the law of near-kinship with the too-great forbearances. Or will you not think these things hold thus?

Palladius: And very much.

Cyril: So then checking angers and reining in wraths, and measuring out the judgments proportionally to each one’s failings, and indeed also that the judgments upon each must be practiced by us upright and altogether unslanderable, we will reckon as a fruit and result of the love unto brothers.

Palladius: And very justly.

Cyril: It is present then already for you if you wish, to be persuaded again, when he says at one time, ‘And you will not bear a grudge against the sons of your people’; and at another time again: ‘And if there should become a dispute in the midst of humans, and they should come forward unto judgment, and they should judge and justify the just and condemn the impious, and if the one doing impiously should be worthy of blows, and having sat him down before the judges, they will also whip him before him, according to his impiety, with a number of forty they will whip him, they will not add; and if they should add to whip him, more blows beyond these, your brother will be unseemly before you.’