# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1878_S17
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 17 —

in general of the degrees or steps set over against one another. This divine prohibition is therefore to be applied not merely to the persons, but above all to those related in the same degree." (Consilia und Bedenken. Nuremberg, 1689. p. 138.)

Certainly. It is just as if I said: "You shall not marry any of the children of a certain person: not Peter, not Paul —" and then stopped giving names. If someone then heard that there is still a John, a brother of Paul and Peter, he would nevertheless have to conclude at once, on the strength of the general prohibition placed first: so not John either.

Dieterich writes further: "If this Mosaic prohibition applied only to the persons expressly named in the third book of Moses, and not to those standing in the same degree to one another, it would have to follow that fleshly union is permitted between a grandson and his grandmother, a grandfather and his great-granddaughter, a brother and his full sister (as some interpret it), a sister's daughter and a mother's brother in kinship by blood, a stepmother and stepson in kinship by marriage; because no express mention of these persons is made. But this is an absurd conclusion, and so what precedes it, from which this conclusion is forced, must be still more absurd." (Ibid. pp. 139 f.)

Finally, let there stand here also the following passage from Chemnitz: "It is to be shown how the list (nominatio) of those persons in Leviticus 18 can be determined by degrees. The foundation for this is shown in that sentence (sententia) Lev. 18:6, which is placed before those prohibitions, namely: 'None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him' ('Omnis homo ad proximum sanguinis sui vel carnis suæ non accedat'). The Papists have indeed misunderstood this sentence, as if it said that one must abstain from all blood relations, so far as the kinship can be recognized. (Causa 35. quaest. 4.) But the emphasis of the Hebrew words שְׁאֵר בְּשָׂרוֹ, that is, remnants of his flesh, shows that what is forbidden is the nearest, who comes nearest to his flesh, or that what is forbidden is the flesh of his flesh, that is, those who either descend from my flesh (propagata est), or from whose flesh I descend, or who descend with me from the same flesh; so that in this way all persons of my flesh are forbidden to me. Thus flesh of my flesh is, above me, the mother, the grandmother; below me, the daughter, the granddaughter; at my side, the brother, the sister, likewise the father's and the mother's sister. And that nearness of the flesh is enumerated in Lev. 21:2 as follows: 'A priest shall not defile himself for a dead person among his people, except for לִשְׁאֵרוֹ [his kin], for his flesh and his near ones (propinquis), that is, for father and mother, son and daughter, also brother and sister, who is still a virgin.' And Num. 27:8: 'If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter;