[136] We have a parallel to this in the widow in the Book of Kings who discourses with the prophet (1 Kings 17:10). She is a widow, not in our sense of the word, when the wife has lost her husband, but because she is widowed of the passions which corrupt and maltreat the mind, like Tamar in the books of Moses.
[137] Tamar was bidden to remain a widow in the house of her father, her one and only saviour (Gen. 38:11), for whose sake she has left for ever the intercourse and society of mortals, and remained desolate and widowed of human pleasures. Thus she receives the divine impregnation, and, being filled with the seeds of virtue, bears them in her womb and is in travail with noble actions. And when she has brought them to the birth, she wins the meed of conquest over her adversaries, and is enrolled as victor with the palm as the symbol of her victory. For Tamar is by interpretation a palm.
[138] To return to the Book of Kings. Every mind that is on the way to be widowed and empty of evil says to the prophet, “O man of God, thou hast come in to remind me of my iniquity and my sin” (1 Kings 17:18). For when he, the God-inspired, has entered the soul—he who is mastered by celestial yearning, stirred to his very depth by the irresistible goads of god-sent frenzy, he creates a memory of past iniquities and sins, and this not to the end that the soul should return to them, but that, with deep groaning and many tears for its old error, it should turn therefrom with loathing for all that it has engendered, and follow instead the guidance of that reason which is the interpreter and prophet of God.
[139] For the men of old days called the prophets sometimes “men of God” and sometimes “seers” (1 Sam. 9:9). And the names they gave were names of literal truth and well suited, the former to their inspiration, the latter to the wide vision of reality which they possessed.