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Mat 24:34. Γενεὰ, generation) sc. an age of men. This notion, which agrees with the event, corresponds most properly with the question, when? etc., proposed in ver, 3; cf. Mat 24:15; Mat 24:20, ch. Mat 23:36; Luk 23:38. From the date of this prediction to the destruction of Jerusalem was a space of forty years, and from the true year of our Lord’s nativity to that event was a space of about seventy-five years. The Jews, however (as, for example, in Seder Olam), reckon seventy-five years as one generation, and the words, οὐ μὴ παρέλθῃ, “shall not pass away,” intimate that the greater part of that generation, but not the whole of it, should have passed away before all the events indicated should have come to pass. The prediction is true with respect to either the forty or the seventy-five years.[1062] So accurately did the Evangelist describe it many years before the event took place.
[1062] Various things [agreeing with our Lord’s prophecy] can be brought forward from the writers of the Talmud, which are reported by them to have happened in the forty years before the destruction of the temple and the city, and which thus, with sufficient accuracy, harmonise with the history of the Passion.-Harm., p. 481.