Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

John 4:17

The woman shrinks from exposure and replies οὐκ ἔχω ἄνδρα, “I have no husband”. A literal truth, but scarcely honest in intention. Jesus at once veils her deceit, καλῶς εἶπας, etc., and disposes of her equivocation by emphasising the ἄνδρα. Thou hast well said, I have no husband. πέντε γὰρ … εἴρηκας. “He whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in this [so far] you said what is true.” In Malachi's time facility for divorce was producing disastrous consequences, and probably many women, not only in Samaria but among the poorer Jews, had a similar history to relate. The stringency with which our Lord speaks on this subject suggests that matters were fast approaching the condition in which they now are in Mohammedan countries. Lane tells us that “there are certainly not many persons in Cairo who have not divorced one wife if they have been long married,” and that there are many who have in the course of ten years married twenty or thirty or more wives (cf. Lecky's European Morals for the state of matters in the Roman world). Jerome, Ep. ad Ageruch, 123, mentions a Roman woman who had had twenty-two husbands. Serious attention need scarcely be given to the fancy of “the critical school” that the woman with her five husbands is intended as an allegorical representation of Samaria with the [seven] gods of the five nations who peopled the country. See 2 Kings 17:24-31. Consistently the man with whom the woman now lived would represent Jehovah. Holtzmann, shrinking from this, suggests Simon Magus. Heracleon discovered in the husband that was not a husband the woman's guardian angel or Pleroma (Bigg's Neoplatonism, 150).

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Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

John 4:17

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