Luke 11:43-44

11:43 Woe to you Pharisees! You love the best seats ¹  in the synagogues ²  and elaborate greetings ³  in the marketplaces! 11:44 Woe to you! ⁴  You are like unmarked graves, and people ⁵  walk over them without realizing it!” ⁶ 

Luke 11:47

11:47 Woe to you! You build ⁷  the tombs of the prophets whom your ancestors ⁸  killed.

[11:43]  ¹ tn Or “seats of honor.” The term here is plural and is not a reference only to the lead “seat of Moses” in the synagogue, but includes the front seats near the ark.

[11:43]  ² sn See the note on synagogues in 4:15.

[11:43]  ³ tn Grk “and the greetings.”

[11:44]  ⁴ tc Most mss (A [D] W Θ Ψ Ë¹³ Ï it) have “experts in the law and Pharisees, hypocrites” after “you,” but this looks like an assimilation to the parallel in Matt 23:25, 27, 29. The shorter reading has earlier attestation from a variety of reliable mss (Ì^45,75 א B C L ˹ 33 1241 2542 lat sa).

[11:44]  ⁵ tn Grk “men.” This is a generic use of ἄνθρωπος (anqrwpo"), referring to both males and females.

[11:44]  ⁶ sn In Judaism to come into contact with the dead or what is associated with them, even without knowing it, makes one unclean (Num 19:11-22; Lev 21:1-3; Mishnah, m. Demai 2:3). To Pharisees, who would have been so sensitive about contracting ceremonial uncleanness, it would have been quite a stinging rebuke to be told they caused it.

[11:47]  ⁷ sn The effect of what the experts in the law were doing was to deny the message of the prophets and thus honor their death by supporting those who had sought their removal. The charge that this is what previous generations did shows the problem is chronic. As T. W. Manson said, the charge here is “The only prophet you honor is a dead prophet!” (The Sayings of Jesus, 101).

[11:47]  ⁸ tn Or “forefathers”; Grk “fathers.”