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Mat 22:32. Ὁ Θεὸς, the God) see Exo 3:6. These words are not put only once, but three times, because Jacob did not hear the promise of God merely from Isaac, or Isaac merely from Abraham, but each of them separately also from God Himself; and Abraham’s name was Divinely changed, Isaac’s Divinely given, that of Israel Divinely added to Jacob: see Gen 17:5; Gen 17:19; Gen 32:28.-οὐκ ἔστι Θεὸς νεκρῶν,[967] He is not God of the dead) i.e., God is not God of the dead. There is an ellipsis as in Rom 3:29. The value of inferential[968] reasoning is seen by this example,-“God is thine.” This phrase expresses both a Divine gift and a human duty. The Divine gift (for that is considered in this passage) thus expressed, is infinite, everlasting, and one which could never be fully realized to us by an earthly life, however long or happy (see Psa 144:15, and Luk 16:25), much less by a pilgrimage of a few and evil days, such as were the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and above all, Jacob, compared with those of their ancestors,[969] who, nevertheless, had not obtained that promise. For it is not said wealth, long life, security, or, in short, the world is thine, but, God is thine: nor is it said God is thine for fifty, an hundred, or seven hundred years, but simply God is thine. When, therefore, God first declared Himself to Abraham to be his God, He conferred, and was acknowledged to have conferred, upon him the everlasting communion of Himself everlasting. And though the death of the body has intervened in the case of the patriarchs, it cannot last for ever, nor produce a long delay, long in comparison with everlasting life. For Abraham himself, the whole man, and all that is included under the name Abraham, that is, not only his soul but also his body, which also received the seal of the promise, possesses GOD. God, however, is not the God of that which is not: He is the Living God; they therefore who possess God must themselves also be living, and as to any portion of them in which life has been suspended, must revive for ever. The force of the formula is shown also in Gnomon on Heb 11:16, which passage is chiefly to this effect, “He hath prepared for them a city,” and that principally in eternity; and therefore He is called their God. And this reasoning of Christ is sound, evident, and then heard for the first time: and most effectually proves both the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of the body, against the Sadducees, who denied altogether the existence of spirits. The force, however, of the argument does not consist in the verb εἰμὶ, I am, nor in the use of its present tense at the time of Moses (for though it is expressed by St Matthew, it is not found in the parallel passages of St Mark or St Luke, or the original of Moses), but in the formula itself.[970] And these phrases, My, Thy, His, etc., GOD, are by far the most frequent. This passage, however, here cited against the Sadducees is furthermore the most striking of all of them, on the following grounds: (1) In it God speaks Himself, an irrefragable proof of its truth; (2) He speaks on the occasion of a most solemn and visible manifestation of Himself; (3) He speaks of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob conjointly; (4) And indeed after their death, and that a long while after, at the very time of performing the promise to them, even in the persons of their descendants, which was a proof that these patriarchs had not in their own lifetime themselves obtained the promises. And thus, as we are told in Luk 20:37, EVEN, KAI, Moses showed the resurrection of the dead, even Moses, not only the prophets, in preference to whom, Moses was read publicly before the time of Antiochus.[971] At the same time, our Lord reduces to its proper shape the proverb of the Jews, who said, “God is not the God of the living but of the dead.” See Axiom ix. of Alexander Morus, and the Dissertation of E. F. Cobius, on the force of this passage.
[967] The reading of E. M. is “οὐκ ἔστιν ὁ Θεὸς Θεὸς νεκρῶν,” rendered in E. V. “God is not the God of the dead.”-(I. B.) BLΔbc Vulg. omit the second θεὸς: so Iren. Hil. 77, 484, 500, 722. But Orig. 3,828b; 829b support it, with the Rec. Text.-ED.
[968] Bengel means to say, that we are bound to receive not only what is actually written totidem verbis in Scripture, but also what may be logically inferred from the words of Holy Writ-not merely what “is contained therein,” but also what “may be proved thereby.”-(I. B.)
[969] Comp. Gen 47:9.-ED.
[970] For the possession of that which is everlasting implies everlasting possession, and everlasting possession involves everlasting duration.-(I. B.)
[971] Hartwell Horne says, “The third part of the synagogue service was the Reading of the Scriptures, which included the reading of the whole law of Moses, and portions of the Prophets, and the Hagiographa or holy writings. (1.) The Law was divided into fifty-three, according to the Masorets, or, according to others, fifty-four Paraschioth or sections: for the Jewish year consisted of twelve lunar months, alternately of twenty-nine or thirty days, that is of fifty weeks and four days. The Jews, therefore, in their division of the law into Paraschioth or sections, had a respect to their intercalary year, which was every second or third, and consisted of thirteen months; so that the whole law was read over this year, allotting one Parascha or section to every Sabbath; and in common years they reduced the fifty-three or fifty-four sections to the number of the fifty Sabbaths, by reading two shorter ones together, as often as there was occasion. They began the course of reading on the first Sabbath after the Feast of Tabernacles; or rather, indeed, on the Sabbath-day before that, when they finished the last course of reading, they also made a beginning of the new course; that so, as the rabbies say, the devil might not accuse them to God of being weary of reading His law. (2.) The portions selected out of the Prophetical writings are termed Haphtoroth. When Antiochus Epiphanes conquered the Jews, about the year 163 before the Christian sera, he prohibited the public reading of the Law in the synagogues on pain of death. The Jews, in order that they might not be wholly deprived of the Word of God, selected from other parts of the Sacred Writings fifty-four portions, which were termed HAPHTORAS חפטורת (HaPHTORoTH), from פטר (PaTaR), he dismissed, let loose, opened-for though the Law was dismissed from their synagogues, and was closed to them by the edict of this persecuting king, yet the prophetic writings, not being under the interdict, were left open; and therefore they used them in place of the others.”-(I. B.)