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Mat_23:37 ff. After denouncing all those woes against the scribes and Pharisees, the departing Redeemer, looking with sad eye into the future, sets the holy city also—which He sees hastening to its destruction under the false guidance of those leaders—in a living connection with the tragic contents of Mat_23:34 ff., but in such a way that his parting words are no longer denunciations of woe, but the deep wail of a heart wounded, because its love has been despised. Thus Mat_23:37 ff. forms an appropriate conclusion to the whole drama of the discourse. Luk_13:34 introduces the words in a historical connection entirely different.
The repetition of the name of Jerusalem is here ἐμφαντικὸς ἐλέος , Euthymius Zigabenus.
ἀποκτείνουσα , κ . τ . λ .] The present participles denote the usual conduct: the murderess, the killer with stones.
πρὸς αὐτήν ] to her; because the attributive participial clause from being in the nominative places the subject addressed under the point of view of the third person, and only then proceeds ( ποσάκις … τέκνα σου ) with the vocative of address in Ἱερουσαλήμ . Comp. Luk_1:45; Job_18:4; Isa_22:16. With Beza and Fritzsche, αὑτήν might be read and taken as equivalent to σεαυτήν ; but αὐτήν is to be preferred, for this reason, that there is here no such special emphasis as to call for the use of the reflective pronoun (we should expect simply πρός σε in that case).
ποσάκις , κ . τ . λ .] The literal meaning of which is: “How often I have wished to take thy citizens under my loving protection as Messiah!” For the metaphor, comp. Eurip. Herc. Fur. 70 f., and the passages in Wetstein, Schoettgen, p. 208 (Rabbinical writers speak of the Shechinah as gathering the proselytes under its wings). Observe ἑαυτῆς : her own chickens. Such was the love that I felt toward you. On the form νοσς . for νεοσς ., see Lobeck, ad Phryn. p. 206. οὐκ ἐθελήσατε ] sc. ἐπισυναχθῆναι ; they refused (Nägelsbach on Il. iii. 289; Baeumlein, Partik. p. 278), namely, to have faith in him as the Messiah, and consequently the blame rested with themselves. This refusal was their actual κρῖμα , Joh_9:39.