1 [3] Kings xvii. 16.
Editorial footnote · Concerning Widows, Chapter V., editorial note cite_note-2 · Original source
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Concerning Widows — Historical footnotes
Chapter V.
Complete historical editorial footnotes. These notes retain the original edition’s wording; individual note authors are unspecified.
English translation and editorial credits: Augustus Henry Eugene de Romestin, Eugene de Romestin (assistant), Henry Thomas Forbes Duckworth (assistant).
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28. Why do you, rich woman, boast yourself by comparison with the poor, and when you are all loaded with gold, and drag along the ground a costly robe, desire to be honoured as though she were inferior and small in comparison with your riches, because you have surpassed the needy with your gifts? Rivers too overflow, when they are too full, but a draught from a brook is more pleasant. New wine foams while fermenting, and the husbandman does not consider as lost that which runs over. While the harvest is being threshed out, grains of corn fall from the groaning floor; but though the harvests fail, the barrel of meal wastes not, and the cruse full of oil gives forth. But the draught emptied the casks of the rich, while the tiny cruse of oil of the widow gave abundance. That, then, is to be reckoned which you give for devotion, not what you cast forth disdainfully. For in fine, no one gave more than she who fed the prophet with her children’s nourishment. And so since no one gave more, no one had greater merit. This has a moral application.