It is not fitting for you to rejoice and exult like the rest of the peoples. For they did not receive any teaching which might lead them to piety, but you, after much instruction and knowledge of God, rebelled against the knowledge which had been given to you because of the depravity of your opinion, and turned to the worship of the idols.

Having collected the fruit of the vine into the wine-vats, they offered the firstlings as a libation to the demons, and not to the God who gave them. They also offered loaves of bread as firstfruits of the harvest—except that the sacrifice will become for them defiled and impure, he says, and the offerings will be considered as mourning breads (that is, disgusting, impure and odious). For what reason? For the law considered unclean anyone who approached a dead body either by blood relationship or rather by the very touching of the body. Therefore it was easy for the relatives or friends of the dead person to become unclean during mourning, since they handled the dead body and since they were willing to do for him what was customary. And whatever they touched became unclean. Therefore the mourning bread is that bread which was at hand as food for those who were mourning for the dead; for those who strive to avoid contamination with a dead body it is considered terrible even to taste this bread. Wherefore the breads themselves are defiled and rejected, even though they may have been offered as firstfruits of the harvest. Those who eat them will become unclean. They will be useful only to their souls, that is, as a food for them.

Let not the people flatter themselves as if they could be safe from contagion of sin, communicating with a sinful priest and yielding their obedience to the unjust and unlawful episcopacy of their leader, when the divine censure threatens through the prophet Hosea and says, Their sacrifices shall be like the bread of mourning: all who eat them shall be defiled. [This] teaching obviously [shows] that all are indeed involved in sin who have been contaminated by the sacrifice of a blasphemous and unjust priest. ^[1] THE FALL OF THE PROPHET. ISHO‘DAD OF MERV: Ephraim is a sentinel with my God, that is, Israel was established by God, he says, so that he might receive the truth and watch over honorable feasts, and that he might be, as is the true prophet, with the help of God, the teacher of the others. But Israel, like a false prophet, has dissuaded others from the truth. The Greek [says], The sentinel of Ephraim was with God, [yet] the prophet has become a deceptive trap in every path. In fact, the prophet was a sentinel with a god in this manner: each of the gods with a false name had his own false diviner, and those, through their heresies, differed from each other in many ways. Some worshiped Baal, some others Chemosh or Baal-Peor; and there was an idol in each temple, and by each of them an appointed false prophet sat. And finally, the ways of worship and divination differed among them. ^[1]

Similarly, the law of the Old Testament, which we said the image of the fig tree represented, threw away the first Jewish people who were useless, that is, sinful and wicked. When these sycophants, to use the Greek word, had been rejected, that is, the conceited and worthless Israelites, there created for Christ through grace as its mother, the rich and fruitful Christian people who were further brought to perfect knowledge of the gospel. Although there is a genus of fig trees that brings its first fruits to maturity, called double bearing, it may signify those of whom it is said, The Lord loved those figs as his precursors. The patriarchs are the precursors.

God is not ashamed to take flesh from such members, for he framed these very members. Who tells us this? The Lord said to Jeremiah, Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. Before you were born I dedicated you.^[1] If in fashioning me, therefore, he touched them and was not ashamed, was he ashamed in forming for himself the holy flesh, the veil of his Godhead? It is God who even now creates the babes in the womb, as it is written in Job, Did you not pour me out as milk, and thicken me like cheese? With skin and flesh you clothed me, with bones and sinews knit me together.^[2] There is nothing corrupt in the human bodily frame unless one defiles it with adulteries and wantonness. He who formed Adam formed Eve also; and male and female were fash-ioned by the divine hands. None of the members of the body, as fashioned from the beginning, is corrupt. Let all heretics be silent who slander their bodies, or rather him who formed them. But let us be mindful of Paul’s words: Do you not know that your members are the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you?^[3] Again, the prophet has foretold in the person of Jesus, my flesh is from them.

While he was still praying, an angel of the Lord, very terrifying, appeared to him, having in his hand a fiery sword unsheathed. He said to our father Pachomius, Just as God has blotted out his name from the ‘Book of Life,’^[1] just so do you drive them out from the midst of the brothers, for they are not ignorant. Indeed, even to the ignorant, impurities of this sort seem like abominations before God. When it was morning he put them in worldly clothing and told them, Go and do as is fitting to the clothes whose practices you have made your own. And he expelled them from among the brothers. The words of the prophet were fulfilled about them, I will drive them out of my house, and I will love them no longer.