To apprehend the force of our Lord’s argument from the Pentateuch against the error of the Pharisees:  “Have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?  God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matt. 22:31, 32), we must understand the form in which the Sadducees denied the doctrine of the resurrection.  They denied, namely, the existence of spirits separated from bodies.  Acts 23:8.  To them, consequently, the death of the body was the annihilation of the whole man, which made the very idea of a future resurrection an absurdity.  Our Saviour showed from the writings of Moses, whose authority they acknowledged, the error of their assumption that the spirit dies with the body.  Thus he demolished the ground on which their denial of a future resurrection rested.

The psalmist says of those who hate Zion:  “Let them be as the grass upon the house-tops, which withereth before one plucketh it” (Eng. version, “before it groweth up"):  “wherewith the mower filleth not his hand, nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom.”  Psa. 129:6, 7.  For the illustration of these words we need a double reference, (1) to the oriental custom of constructing flat roofs covered with earth, on which grass readily springs up; (2) to the division of the year into two seasons, the rainy and the dry, upon the commencement of which latter such grass speedily withers.  Another reference to the same oriental roofs we have in the words of Solomon:  “The contentions of a wife are a continual dropping;” “a continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike” (chaps. 19:13; 27:15), where we are to understand a continual dropping through of water from the roof, which makes every thing within uncomfortable.

Our Lord’s parable of the ten virgins (Matt. 25:1-13) requires for its illustration a knowledge of the oriental customs connected with marriage:  the transaction recorded by Luke, where a woman came behind Jesus as he reclined at the table, washed his feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair (Luke 7:37, 38), and the position of John when at the last supper he leaned on Jesus’ bosom (John 13:23, 25), cannot be made intelligible without a knowledge of the reclining posture in which meals were then taken:  one familiar only with the use of glass or earthen bottles cannot comprehend the force of our Lord’s maxim respecting the necessity of putting new wine into new bottles (Matt. 9:17), till he is informed that oriental bottles are made of leather.  We might go on multiplying illustrations indefinitely, but the above must suffice.  We may affirm, without fear of contradiction, that the study of the Holy Scriptures has contributed more than all other causes to the diffusion among the masses of the community of a knowledge of ancient history and antiquities.  To say that a congregation has a thorough knowledge of the Bible is equivalent to affirming that it has an enlarged acquaintance with the ancient world in its spirit as well as in its outward institutions and forms.