Against Celsus 4.44

Being far from the intention of what is written, he says that God also gave wells to the righteous. For he did not observe that the righteous do not construct cisterns but dig “wells,” seeking to find the spring and source of drinkable good things that lies within, taking figuratively the command which says: “Drink waters from your own vessels and from the spring of your own wells. Let not your waters overflow outside your spring, but let your waters pass into your own streets. Let them be yours alone, and let no stranger share them with you.” In many places the Scripture has used events that happened in history and recorded them to present greater things revealed in hidden meaning; such are the stories about wells, and about the marriages and various unions of the righteous, which someone will try to explain more opportunely in commentaries on those very passages. That wells were indeed constructed by the righteous in the land of the Philistines, as is recorded in Genesis, is clear from the marvelous wells shown at Ascalon, worth recording for the strangeness and peculiarity of their construction compared with other wells. That brides and maidservants are to be taken figuratively is not our own teaching, but we have received it from wise men of old, one of whom, rousing his hearer to figurative interpretation, said: “Tell me, you who read the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free woman. But the son of the slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the son of the free woman through the promise. These things are allegorized; for these women are two covenants, one from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery, which is Hagar”; and a little after, he says, “But the Jerusalem above is free, which is our mother.” Whoever will take up the letter to the Galatians will know how the stories of the marriages and of the unions with maidservants have been allegorized, the Scripture wanting us too to imitate not the bodily actions, as they are thought, of those who did these things, but, as the apostles of Jesus are accustomed to call them, the spiritual ones.