Luke 6:12

12. In those days A customary Hebrew phrase, indefinite in its character, intended to refer to the general period or era of which the author has written or is about to write.

Went out Out of synagogue and city; from the crowded haunts of men. Solemn was the exchange from town to mountain; from man to

God. A mountain Rather the mountain; and this phrase, the mountain, το ορος , occurs so ordinarily in the Greek of the Gospels that a German sceptic wittily remarks that “there is but one mountain in the gospels.” But this supposed argument against their truth Ebrard learnedly reverses in their favour. Palestine is, on the whole, not a plain interspersed with mountains, but an extensive mountain-level intersected by vales and lowlands. The mountain is therefore the ordinary table-land, the mountain-level, the second story of the region, including an occasional lofty peak or ridge, like Tabor, Hermon, and in the present case, the double brow of Hattin. Hattin was the mountain-summit into which our Lord ascended for a night of prayer; and the plain of Luke 6:17, is the table-land or lower mountain plain upon which the sermon was delivered.

All night The ordination sermon was preceded by a whole night of prayer! So solemn a work is the holy ministry! With what depth of devotion ought the young minister, after this example of Jesus, to consecrate himself to God when about to take his ordination vows!

In prayer to God God being in the genitive, it would read literally in prayer of God. Yet there is not a little plausibility in the rendering in a proseucha; that is, a prayer-house or chapel of God. The Jews, it is certain, were accustomed to erect oratories or chapels of private devotion. Both Philo and Josephus make mention of them. The Jews say that when R. Jochanan visited the camp of Vespasian the Roman General, he was asked by the Roman what personal favour he desired, and the Rabbi replied, “I desire nothing but this school of Jabneh, that I may teach disciples and fix therein an oratory.” It is very natural to suppose that an oratory in the mountain was the place of Jesus’s prayer. See Kitto’s Bib. Encyc. on the word Proseucha.