On the Unchangeableness of God (136-140)

And the woman who met the prophet, [*] in the book of Kings, resembles this fact: "And she is a widow;" not meaning by that, as we generally use the word, a woman when she is bereft of her husband, but that she is so, from being free from those passions which corrupt and destroy the soul, as Thamar is represented by Moses.

For she also being a widow, was commanded to sit down in the house of the father, the only Saviour; [*] on whose account, having forsaken for ever the company and society of men, she is at a distance from and widowhood of all human pleasures, and receives a divine seed; and being filled with the seeds of virtue, she conceives, and is in travail of virtuous actions. And when she has brought them forth, she carries off the prize against her adversaries, and is enrolled as victorious, bearing the palm as the emblem of her victory. For the name Thamar, being interpreted, means the palm-tree.

And every soul that is beginning to be widowed and devoid of evils, says to the prophet, "O, man of God! hast thou come to me to remind me of my iniquity and of my sin?" [*] For he being inspired, and entering into the soul, and being filled with heavenly love, and being amazingly excited by the intolerable stimulus of heaven-inflicted frenzy, works in the soul a recollection of its ancient iniquities and offences: not in order that it may commit such again, —but that, greatly lamenting and bitterly bewailing its former error, it may hate its own offspring, and reject them with aversion, and may follow the admonitions of the word of God, the interpreter and prophet of his will.

For the men of old used to call the prophets sometimes men of God, and sometimes seers, [*] affixing appropriate and becoming names to their enthusiasm, and inspiration, and to the foreknowledge of affairs which they enjoyed.

Very properly, therefore, the most sacred Moses says that, the earth was corrupted at that time when the virtues of the just Noah were made manifest: "And the whole earth," says he, "was corrupted, because all flesh had corrupted his (αὐτου̃) way upon the earth." [*]