Luke 10:30

30. A certain man This man is doubtless to be supposed a Jew, since he goes from Jerusalem. But our Lord chooses to state him to be simply and purely a

man. Went down from Jerusalem to Jericho From the heights of the mountains upon which Jerusalem was built, to the vale of the Jordan, in which Jericho stood, (eighteen miles distant,) is almost a constant descent. This man, we may suppose, takes the usual route. Starting from what is now St. Stephen’s gate, through the eastern wall of Jerusalem, he crosses the garden and the southern slopes of the Mount of Olives to Bethany. Thence he proceeds through the road, once the channel of a stream and now a deep ravine; and at about ten miles from the city he enters that gloomy road through the desert wilderness called by St. Jerome the bloody way, and which from that time to the present has been the haunt of Arab and other robbers. “If we might conceive the ocean,” says Professor Hackett, “as being suddenly congealed when its waves are tossed mountain-high and pitching in wild confusion against each other, we should then have some idea of the scene of the desert in which the Saviour has placed so truthful a parable as that of the good Samaritan. The ravines, the almost inaccessible cliffs, the caverns, furnish admirable lurking-places for robbers; they can rush forth upon their victims unexpectedly and escape as soon almost beyond the possibility of pursuit.” Scarce a season at the present day passes in which some murder does not vindicate its title to the name of the bloody way.

Should the traveller have escaped unharmed, as the priest and Levite did, in due time there would open before him in rare beauty the plains of Jericho and the distant towers of that city of palms. It had been lately raised to its highest pitch of splendour by Herod the Great, who here built a favourite palace; and here, smitten, not by the vengeance of man, but by the hand of God, he died a most loathsome and terrible death. At the present day scarce do the ruins themselves remain to tell the spot where its towers, walls, and palaces stood.

Thieves Rather robbers. The thief takes by stealth, the robber by force.

Stripped him of his raiment The word raiment is not in the Greek. The stripping included, by force of the word, his property as well as his

raiment. Half dead So near dead as to be unable to help himself; and yet not without hope if he were but helped.