Who is this that cometh from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah (Ib. lxiii.), i.e. ‘Cyrus has inflicted severe chastisement on Edom, and brought back those who had been carried thither from Jerusalem into captivity, as we read in the fifteenth chapter, where it is said, The redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion.’
Behold the days will come, saith the Lord, when I shall raise unto David a righteous branch (Jerem. xxiii. 5). The individual here referred to our exponent believes to be Zerubabel.
Know, therefore, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah, the Prince, is seven weeks, and three-score and two weeks ... and after three-score and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off and be no more (Daniel, ix. 25). ‘The times specified,’ says Villanovanus, ‘refer to those of the exile and the return of the captives by favour of Cyrus, who is the Messiah or Anointed One of God, that is here spoken of. Sixty-two weeks having passed from the great event, Cyrus will have been cut off, and all have gone to wreck again.’
Then shall Judah and Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, &c., i.e. ‘Judah and Israel will have become united for a season, as they were under Hezekiah.’
The words of the second verse of chapter vi., After two days will he revive us; in the third day he will raise us up, ‘refer to the extraordinary discomfiture of the Assyrians in the reign of Hezekiah.’
For behold, in those days when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will also gather all the nations, &c. (Joel, iii. 1). ‘These words have a literal application to the defeat of the Assyrians and the glories of Hezekiah’s reign. Disasters many have befallen the chosen seed; but their oppressors will in turn be desolated, and Judah, restored, shall dwell for ever in Jerusalem.’
The texts in Micah generally spoken of as exclusively prophetical of Christ, our commentator thinks refer literally to Hezekiah and times subsequent to the defeat of the Assyrians. But thou, Bethlehem-Ephratah, out of thee shall he come forth to be a ruler in Israel, viz., ‘Hezekiah, who will deliver the people from the Assyrian.’
Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion; shout, O Daughter of Jerusalem; behold, thy King cometh unto thee lowly, and riding upon an ass, even on a colt, the foal of an ass. This text, which is referred to Christ in Matthew (chapter xxii.), is connected by Villanovanus with the compassionate Zerubabel and his entrance into Jerusalem.
No one will be surprised to learn that these comments of the learned Villanovanus did not escape the notice of the great ecclesiastical centres of his day. That of Lyons is by-and-by found condemning outright both them and the book they pretend to illustrate. That of Madrid is content to order by far the greater number of the glosses to be expunged, but leaves the Bible itself available to the privileged; whilst that of Rome, less tolerant, not only condemns the expositions, but puts the book upon the Index prohibitorius. The perusal of such comments, preparatory to drawing the pen through them, it was surmised by the far-sighted ecclesiastics of Rome might lead to independent thought, and this is precisely what the Church they represent would have every man, woman, and child in the land most carefully to eschew.
Calvin, we may imagine, was not likely to think any better of Villanovanus’s annotations than the heads of the Church of Rome; on the contrary, pinning his faith on its text as prophetical in the very strictest sense of the word, any attack on its sufficiency as a ground for dogmatic conclusion was felt by him to be a matter much more serious than by the Church of Rome, which sets its own traditions as equipollent to, where not even of higher authority than, that of the Bible on all matters of faith. To see the Scriptures of the Jews otherwise than as Calvin and the Reformers saw them was, in their eyes, to question the infallible book they had substituted for the infallible Pope so lately abandoned by them. We should therefore expect to meet Calvin, with occasion serving, making a point against our expositor on the ground of the Pagnini; and accordingly we find Servetus’s comments brought up against him in the most marked manner during his Geneva Trial, whilst in the Déclaration pour maintenir la vraye Foye, and the Defensio orthodoxæ Fidei, they are spoken of as impertinences and impieties, the Publisher being said at the same time to have been nothing less than cheated out of the money he paid the editor for his work. ‘Who,’ says Calvin, ‘shall venture to say that it was not thievish in the editor when he took five hundred livres in payment for the vain trifles and impious follies with which he encumbered almost every page of the book?’ (‘Opusc. Theol. Om.’ p. 703).