Biblion Bible Commentary
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All the Living That She Had
Luke 21:1-4
1 He looked up and saw the rich people who were putting their gifts into the treasury. · WEB
He watches the offering box and notices the smallest gift of the day.
He looked up and saw the rich people who were putting their gifts into the treasury. He saw a certain poor widow casting in two small brass coins Luke 21:1–2.
The scene follows immediately on a warning about scribes who devour widows' houses Luke 20:47, and the two belong together. Having named the abuse, he sits and watches one of its victims give.
The treasury was a set of trumpet-shaped receptacles in the temple court, and large donations were audible. Everyone in the court could hear who was giving what.
The coin named is the smallest in circulation. Two of them is the least a person could give without giving nothing, and the account says she put in two — she could have kept one, and nobody would have known.
"Truly I tell you, this poor widow put in more than all of them" Luke 21:3.
The claim is arithmetically false and is stated as fact, which is the point. A different scale is in use, and the next verse gives it.
"For all these put in gifts for God from their abundance, but she, out of her poverty, put in all that she had to live on" Luke 21:4.
The measure is not the amount given but the amount kept. By that reckoning the wealthy donors gave a surplus they would not miss, and she gave everything — the phrase is her whole living, the same word used of the estate the father divided between his sons Luke 15:12.
There is one thing the passage does not do, and its restraint is worth noticing. He does not stop her, and he does not commend the system that took her last coin. He has just condemned the men running it. Both stand: the institution was corrupt, and her gift was the largest thing that happened in that court all day.
And it is the last recorded thing he sees in the temple before he walks out and predicts that not one of its stones will be left on another.
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