Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
Luke 12:13-21, Bigger barns
A man asks Jesus to make his brother divide the inheritance. Jesus refuses, warns against greed, and tells of a rich farmer who plans bigger barns for his surplus and dies that night.
Luke 12:13-21, in every translation this tool compares.
Someone in the crowd tells Jesus to order his brother to share the inheritance with him; Jesus asks who made him a judge or arbitrator over them, and warns that life does not consist in possessions. He tells of a rich man whose land yields so much that he plans to pull down his barns and build bigger ones, then tell himself to relax, eat, drink and be merry. God calls him a fool: that very night his life is demanded of him, and who will get what he has stored up?
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/adoption-and-heirs\/","n":"Adoption, heirs and wills","s":"A family's property passed to its heirs; in Jewish practice the land went to the sons, the eldest with a double share. Roman law also let a man adopt a son, often a grown one, who left his old debts and ties behind and became his heir. A will, sealed before witnesses, settled who inherited and who looked after an heir too young to inherit.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/estates-and-laborers\/","n":"Estates, tenants and day laborers","s":"Wealthy owners, often living in town, let their land to tenant farmers for a share of the crop or hired day laborers in the marketplace and paid them a denarius at sundown.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/parables\/","n":"Parables and riddles","s":"Short stories that compared one thing to another. Jewish teachers used them to make a point plain, and without the point stated they worked as riddles.","r":""}
Archaeologists have found large grain silos on the farms of wealthy absentee landowners, as at Sepphoris, and such men belonged to a leisured class usually estimated at under one percent (Keener); Proverbs 11:26 warns against holding back grain while others go hungry (Keener's notes). Blomberg notes that in a world where seventy to eighty percent of people barely got by, a man with a surplus was expected to share it generously. Bailey points out that the man talks only to himself, in a village world where the leading men talked every matter over together at the gate, and sums up God's verdict: "You plan alone, build alone, indulge alone, and now you will die alone!" Eat, drink and be merry echoes Isaiah 22:13, and the Greco-Roman world heard it as a jab at the Epicureans (Keener's notes; Blomberg). Rabbis often settled disputes over the law of inheritance, and since the firstborn took a double portion, the man is probably a younger son demanding his legal share (Strauss). Sirach 11:18-19 tells of a man who says he will now feast on his goods, not knowing how soon he will leave them to others and die (Strauss).
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Luke 12:13, 12:16-18 and 12:20
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Luke 12:13-15, 12:18 and 12:19
- Kenneth E. Bailey, Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes, Through Peasant Eyes, ch. 4, The Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-21)
- Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 8.1.5 The Rich Fool
- Mark L. Strauss, Luke, in Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary, ed. Clinton E. Arnold, on Luke 12:13-21, 12:13 and 12:15
