Note 89 — Chapter II · BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION OF JESUS.

But what had the Messiah to do in the wilderness? That the Messiah, the second Saviour, should like his typical predecessor, Moses, on Mount Sinai, submit himself to the holy discipline of fasting, was an idea the more inviting, because it furnished a suitable introduction to the first temptation which presupposed extreme hunger. The type of Moses and that of Elias (1 Kings xix. 8), determined also the duration of this fast in the wilderness, for they too had fasted forty days; moreover, the number forty was held sacred in Hebrew antiquity.89 Above all, the forty days of the temptation of Jesus seem, as Olshausen justly observes, a miniature image of the forty years’ trial in the wilderness, endured by the Israelitish people as a penal emblem of the forty days spent by the spies in the land of Canaan (Num. xiv. 34). For, that in the temptations of Jesus there was a special reference to the temptation of Israel in the wilderness, is shown by the circumstance that all the passages cited by Jesus in opposition to Satan are drawn from the recapitulatory description of the journeyings of the Israelites in Deut. vi. and viii. The apostle Paul too, 1 Cor. x. 6, enumerates a series of particulars from the behaviour of the Israelites in the wilderness, with the consequent judgments of God, and warns Christians against similar conduct, pronouncing, v. 6 and 11, the punishments inflicted on the ancients to be types for the admonition of the living, his cotemporaries, on whom the ends of the world were come; wherefore, he adds, let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. It is not probable that this was merely the private opinion of the apostle—it seems rather to have been a current notion that the hard trials of the people led by Moses, as well as of Moses individually, were types of those which awaited the followers of the Messiah in the catastrophe which he was to usher in, and still more emphatically the Messiah himself, who here appears as the antitype of the people, gloriously overcoming all the temptations under which they had fallen.