1 Timothy 5:9

1 Timothy 5:9. The negative conditions are followed by the positive.

Let not a woman be taken into the number. Better, ‘ entered on the register or list.' The word implies a systematic, organized relief of poverty, guarded, as far as possible, against the indiscriminate almsgiving that tends to pauperism. Probably, indeed, the ‘registered widows' were a selected band chosen out of the order for special distinction, fulfilling the more rigid conditions that entitled them to permanent support. It would seem hard to enforce all these rules as indispensable on all applicants for relief.

Under threescore years of age. On the assumption just suggested, the age would be urged as a security for gravity, and staid experience, On the more common interpretation, a woman under sixty might be thought of as still able to earn her own living.

The wife of one husband. As in the corresponding phrase of 1 Timothy 3:2, ‘Married once and once only,' the second marriage, in any case, involving some loss of claim to reverence. There is no hardship in the rule interpreted in the way now suggested. As commonly understood, it involves the anomaly that St. Paul afterwards recommends the ‘younger widows' to take a step which would deprive them in their old age of all claim to maintenance.