Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Corinthians 10:4

1 Corinthians 10:4. and did all drink the same spiritual drink the water that gushed for them out of the flinty rock (Psalms 105:41; Psalms 114:8).

for they drank of the spiritual Rock that followed them: and the Rock was Christ. This “meat” and “drink” are called “spiritual,” perhaps primarily, as having been supplied supernaturally (as Meyer, after the Greek fathers, and Alford take it), but mainly because under this merely outward and visible sustenance, by which the chosen people were enabled to pursue their way to the Promised Land, is couched the higher nutriment of God's true people which certainly is “Christ” in their progress towards the “better country.” As to how “the Rock followed them,” it was certainly not in the fantastic sense of the Jewish legend (that a well, which was formed out of the spring in Horeb, followed Israel during all the forty years), which too many modern critics palm upon the apostle, as if it was to this, as a fact, that he here refers. The question is as Neander pertinently asks whether the tradition is not itself of later date than our Epistle, and was not suggested by it. As to the actual matter of fact, all we know for certain is, that they had two miraculous supplies of water one, near the outset of their wilderness journey, at Horeb (Exodus 17:4-6); the other, at Meribah Kadesh, near its close (Numbers 20:11); and since without a supply of water all through they could not have subsisted for a week, and yet no such fatal want overtook them, one may well say that they had an unfailing supply, or (in the apostle's way of putting it), that “the Rock followed them.”

The reader should observe how, five times in the course of these four opening verses, the word “all” is ominously repeated, the more emphatically to make the sad contrast between the commencement and the close of the journey how all had a common start, and, almost to the end, all made common progress, and yet, as is now to be added, in the case of most of them, far from a common end.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Corinthians 10:4

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