# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S127
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry. 127

is being applied does not become wrong, one must first of all keep in
view that the law addresses the man, not the woman. Consequently, when
the application is to be made to a woman, one must take care that no
improper relationship be ascribed to her, and that the whole law,
together with the attached additions, fits her case. Furthermore, it is
indeed not at all in doubt whether the marriage laws are to be
understood only of the cases narrated, or of the degrees of kinship and
affinity. They must certainly be understood in terms of the degrees,
since otherwise one would contradict the rule of verse 6, inasmuch as by
far not all the cases that fall under the rule are narrated. But in the
narrated cases one should likewise not consider the narration idle, but
should pay no less attention to the explanatory, restricting, or
extending additions that are expressed along with them. What one wishes,
then, to hold as equivalent to the case forbidden there must not merely
be reckoned according to the degree of kinship, but must resemble that
case in every respect. For precisely by the fact that a law with special
provisions exists for this case, that case is marked out — so that one
should attend not merely to counting the degrees of kinship according to
the rule, but to the further matters which the LORD states there.

This is then especially necessary when the lawgiver, in a particular
case, has gone beyond the rule (interpretatione authentica extensiva).
For since we are not permitted to make such an extension on our own
authority, but are directed only to the rule, we may likewise understand
the lawgiver's authentic extension to a more remote degree — perhaps for
reasons not even sufficiently known to us — only of a case that is truly
equivalent in this way, where precisely those reasons apply. But we are
by no means permitted merely to count degrees here, to the detriment of
the general rule, as if a new general rule were given here, differing
from that of verse 6. For example: the prohibition against marrying
one's father's brother's wife, verse 14, is an extension of the rule and
goes beyond it, because this woman cannot be called the flesh of your
flesh, but, following the same old manner of speaking with repetition of
the word, would have to be called the flesh of the flesh of your flesh.
For the son is one flesh with the father through descent, and his father
is one flesh with his own brother, and this brother is one flesh with
his own wife through marriage. Whatever the reason for the extension may
be, it is not apparent why the prohibition should not just as well be
understood of the mother's brother's wife. But no one, surely, will
doubt that the relation of reverence toward the parents — in which their
siblings, and consequently the spouses of these, share — is the reason
for the prohibition of this marriage. It was fitting, namely, that among
a people who distinguished themselves through the knowledge of God and