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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Luke 16:23 - 16:23
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
23. ἐν τῷ ᾅδῃ. ‘In Hades.’ See Luk 10:15. Hades, which is represented as containing both Paradise and Gehenna, and is merely the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Sheol, ‘the grave,’ is the intermediate condition of the dead between death and the final judgment. The scene on earth is contrasted with the reversed conditions of the other world. The entire imagery and phraseology are Jewish, and are borrowed from those which were current among the Rabbis of Christ’s day. Beyond the awful truth that death brings no necessary forgiveness, and therefore that the retribution must continue beyond the grave, we are not warranted in pressing the details of the parable which were used as part of the vivid picture. And since the scene is in Hades, we cannot draw from it any safe inferences as to the final condition of the lost. The state of Dives may be, as Tertullian says, a praelibatio sententiae, but it is not as yet the absolute sentence.
ἀπὸ μακρόθεν. One of the numerous mixtures of analytic and synthetic expressions (see my Brief Greek Syntax, pp. 1–6) which we find in the decadent stages of a language. Μακρόθεν alone means ‘from afar,’ but is helped out by ἀπό, and the pleonasm is unconscious, as in Mon cher Monsieur.
ἐν τοῖς κόλποις. The plur. is often used for ‘bosom’ because the word properly means the folds of the robe (sinus). For the meaning of the metaphoric expression see Joh 1:18; Joh 13:23.