Chapter 19

¹ For when the Scripture says that Susanna went in and walked about in the garden of her husband, it signifies that all kings and those who hold high rank plant gardens for their own delight in cities and in the countryside, just as Jehoiakim too did in Babylon.

² For there was a garden adjoining his house, into which Susanna would go and walk, persevering in prayer and singing hymns and songs to God; and she sent out the two maidservants to bring what had been ordered, so that she might bathe.

³ And they shut the doors of the garden but went out by the side ways, foretelling thereby what was to come: that whoever wishes to partake of the water in the garden must renounce the wide doors and enter through the narrow and afflicted one.

⁴ And they did not see the elders, because they were hidden. For just as then in the garden the devil was hidden in the serpent, so now too, hidden in the elders, he conceived his own desire, that once again, a second time, he might corrupt Eve.