lean enter
without distinction. Although the Church is small, she rules the earth
notwithstanding, and it is due to her that the world is preserved,
just as the unclean animals were preserved in the ark. Others stretch
the application so far as to point to the wound in the side of Jesus'
body as prefigured by the windows in the ark. These are allegories
which are not exactly profound, but still harmless because they harbor
no error and serve a purpose other than that of wrangling, namely,
that of rhetorical ornamentation.

V. 16. _A light shalt thou make to the ark, and to a cubit shalt thou
finish it upward; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side
thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it._

251. Behold, how diligent an architect God is! With what care he
interests himself in all the parts of the structure and their
arrangement. Furthermore, the word _Zohar_ does not properly signify
window, but southern light. The question may be raised here whether
the ark had only one window or several. For the Hebrew language
permits the use of the singular for the plural, or of the collective
for the distributive term, as for instance: "I will destroy man from
the face of the ground." Here evidently not one man but many are
spoken of. But to me it seems there was only one window that shed
light upon man's domicile.

252. The Latin interpreter is so strangely obscure as to fail to make
himself understood. My unqualified opinion is that he was unable to
divest himself of the image of a modern ship, in which men are
commonly carried in the lower part. Nor is it quite intelligible what
he says about the door, inasmuch as it is certain that the ell-long
window was in the upper part, and the door in the center of the side
or in the navel of the ark. Thus, also, Eve was framed from the middle
portion of man's body. The whole structure was divided into three
partitions, a higher, a central and a lower one, and it was the upper
one which, according to my view, was illuminated by the light of day
through the window.

253. You may say, however: What kind of a window was it, or how could
it exist in those frequent and violent rains? For rain did not fall
then as it does ordinarily, since the water in forty days rose to such
proportions as to submerge the highest mountains by fifteen
arm-lengths. The Jews claim that the window was closed by a crystal
which transmitted the light. But too curious a researc