Luke 1:80 And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his showing to Israel. Not in sandy deserts like those of Arabia, but in the wild, waste region south of Jericho and the fords of Jordan to the shores of the Dead Sea. This was known as Araboth or ha.Arabah. This region, especially where it approached the Ghor and the Dead Sea, was lonely and forbidding in its physical features, and would suit the stern spirit on which it also reacted. In 1 Samuel 23:19, it is called Jeshimon, or "the Horror." John was by no means the only hermit. The political unsettlement, the shamelessness of crime, the sense of secular exhaustion, the widespread Messianic expectation, marked " the fulness of time." Banus the Pharisee also lived a life of ascetic hardness in the Arabah, and Josephus tells us that he lived with him for three years in his mountain cave on fruits and water. But there is not in the Gospels the faintest trace of any intercourse between John or our Lord and His disciples, with the Essenes. The great Italian painters follow a right conception when they paint even the boy John as emaciated with early asceticism. In 2 Esdras 9:24, the seer is directed to go into a field where no house is, and to "taste no flesh, drink no wine, and eat only the flowers of the field," as a preparation for "talking with the Most High." (Archdeacon Farrer.) Parallel Verses KJV: And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel. |
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