=6. This they said tempting him.= The commentators have been needlessly puzzled to explain how Christ’s answer to this question could have furnished matter for accusation. The Pharisees would have accused him to the people, not to the Roman government. The law of Moses was a dead letter. There is no authentic instance in post-Mosaic history of an execution under it. Divorce was easy, and the injured husband generally avoided public disgrace by simply separating from his unfaithful wife. Could Christ refuse to adjudge the case? He had claimed to be King of Israel, in the Sermon on the Mount, had put his own precepts above those of Moses, and had proclaimed a far more stringent law of purity than Moses ever enacted (Matt. 5:27-32). Could he acquit her, and so set aside the Mosaic law? He had declared that not one jot or tittle of it should pass away till all was fulfilled, and that whoever relaxed the least of its precepts should be least in his kingdom. Could he condemn her? He would thus revive an obsolete statute, and enforce it against a hapless and defenceless woman--he who had come to seek and to save the lost, who had received the publican and harlot among his disciples, and had accepted the homage of a notorious woman of the town (Luke 7:36-39). It often happens that people are unwilling to have a teacher set aside in theory a law which they are equally unwilling to see enforced in practice. Only a small minority is willing in our own day to abolish capital punishment; but only rarely is a jury willing to inflict it. There are comparatively few persons who are willing to live according to the Sabbath law which they wish their minister to preach.--=But Jesus stooped down and with his finger wrote on the ground.= The words _as though he heard them not_ are an addition of the translators, though at least one manuscript contains the idea. What was the meaning of this action? Various opinions have been suggested, _e. g._, a usual act signifying preoccupation of mind (_Alford_); to hide his own confusion, the shock to his own moral sensibility by the grossness of the Pharisees’ public abuse of the woman (_Geikie_); as a judge, for a judicial sentence is not only pronounced, but written (_Godet_); as a refusal to interfere, a sign that he paid no attention to their question (_Meyer_, _Luthardt_). His object in this writing seems to me to be interpreted by its result. It turned all eyes from the wretched woman, in an anguish of shame and terror, to himself. She stood alone and forgotten; all eyes were then and have ever since been fixed on the figure of Christ, wondering what and why he wrote in the dust. It is not fanciful to note the contrast between this writing and that prescribed in case of the trial of a suspected adulteress by the Mosaic law (Numb. 5:23). The priest was to write certain curses in a book, then wash them with bitter water, which the accused was required to drink, that the curses might enter into her if she were guilty.