Luke 11: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

A disciple asks Jesus how to pray, and he gives them the words to say, then two pictures about asking: a neighbor who gets up at midnight because a friend keeps knocking, and a father who gives his son good things rather than harmful ones. After Jesus drives a demon out of a man who could not speak, some in the crowd say he does it by Beelzebub, and others demand a sign from heaven; he answers that a divided kingdom falls, that he acts by the finger of God, and that this generation will get no sign except the sign of Jonah. He then speaks about light and the eye, and at a Pharisee's table pronounces a series of woes on the Pharisees and the experts in the law, ending with the charge that this generation will be held responsible for the blood of the prophets. The chapter closes with the scribes and Pharisees pressing him with questions, watching for something they can use to accuse him.

Claim by Claim

1. 11:1
   • Jesus was praying in a certain place
   • He stopped praying
   • One of his disciples spoke to him after he stopped
   • The disciple addressed him as Lord
   • The disciple asked him to teach them to pray
   • The disciple said John also taught his disciples to pray
2. 11:2
   • He said to them that when they pray, they should say the following
   • The prayer addresses God as Our Father who is in heaven
   • The prayer asks that God's name be hallowed
   • The prayer asks that God's kingdom come
   • The prayer asks that God's will be done in earth as it is in heaven
3. 11:3
   • The prayer asks God to give us our daily bread day by day
4. 11:4
   • The prayer asks God to forgive us our sins
   • The prayer states that we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us
   • The prayer asks God not to lead us into temptation
   • The prayer asks God to deliver us from evil
5. 11:5
   • He said to them
   • He asked which of them would have a friend
   • In the case posed, the man goes to his friend at midnight
   • In the case posed, the man asks the friend to lend him three loaves
6. 11:6
   • The man says a friend of his has come to him from a journey
   • The man says he has nothing to set before that friend
7. 11:7
   • The friend inside answers
   • The friend inside says not to trouble him
   • The friend inside says the door is already shut
   • The friend inside says his children are with him in bed
   • The friend inside says he cannot get up and give him anything
8. 11:8
   • Jesus says to them
   • The man inside will not get up and give to him because he is his friend
   • Because of the asker's shameless persistence the man will get up
   • The man will give him as much as he needs
9. 11:9
   • Jesus says to them
   • He commands them to ask
   • He says it will be given to them
   • He commands them to seek
   • He says they will find
   • He commands them to knock
   • He says it will be opened to them
10. 11:10
    • Everyone who asks receives
    • The one who seeks finds
    • It will be opened to the one who knocks
11. 11:11
    • He asks which father among them, if his son asks for bread, would give him a stone
    • He asks whether a father, if his son asks for a fish, would give him a serpent instead of a fish
12. 11:12
    • He asks whether a father, if his son asks for an egg, would give him a scorpion
13. 11:13
    • They are evil
    • They know how to give good gifts to their children
    • The Father in heaven will much more give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him
14. 11:14
    • Jesus was casting out a demon
    • The demon was mute
    • The demon went out
    • The man who had been mute spoke
    • The crowds marveled
15. 11:15
    • Some of them said he casts out demons by Beelzebub
    • They called Beelzebub the chief of the demons
16. 11:16
    • Others tested him
    • They sought from him a sign from heaven
17. 11:17
    • Jesus knew their thoughts
    • He said to them
    • Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation
    • A house divided against a house falls
18. 11:18
    • He asks how Satan's kingdom can stand if Satan is divided against himself
    • He says this because they say he casts out demons by Beelzebub
19. 11:19
    • He poses that if he casts out demons by Beelzebub, he asks by whom their sons cast them out
    • For that reason their sons will be their judges
20. 11:20
    • If he casts out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon them
21. 11:21
    • When a strong man fully armed guards his own court, his goods are in peace
22. 11:22
    • When someone stronger than he comes upon him and overcomes him, that stronger one takes away all his armor in which he trusted
    • The stronger one divides his spoils
23. 11:23
    • Whoever is not with Jesus is against him
    • Whoever does not gather with Jesus scatters
24. 11:24
    • When the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places
    • It seeks rest
    • It finds none
    • It says it will return to the house it came out of
25. 11:25
    • When it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order
26. 11:26
    • Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself
    • They enter in and dwell there
    • The last state of that man is worse than the first
27. 11:27
    • As he was saying these things, a woman from the crowd lifted up her voice
    • She said to him that the womb that bore him is blessed
    • She said the breasts he nursed at are blessed
28. 11:28
    • He said instead that those who hear the word of God and keep it are blessed
29. 11:29
    • The crowds were gathering thickly together
    • He began to say that this generation is an evil generation
    • This generation seeks a sign
    • No sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah
    • The King James calls Jonah the prophet
30. 11:30
    • Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites
    • The Son of man will likewise be a sign to this generation
31. 11:31
    • The queen of the south will rise up in the judgment with the men of this generation
    • She will condemn them
    • She came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon
    • Something greater than Solomon is here
32. 11:32
    • The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation
    • They will condemn it
    • They repented at the preaching of Jonah
    • Something greater than Jonah is here
33. 11:33
    • No one who lights a lamp puts it in a hidden place
    • No one puts a lit lamp under a bushel measure
    • A lit lamp is put on a lampstand
    • The purpose is that those who come in may see the light
34. 11:34
    • The lamp of the body is the eye
    • When your eye is single, your whole body is full of light
    • When your eye is evil, your body is full of darkness
35. 11:35
    • He commands them to take heed that the light in them is not darkness
36. 11:36
    • If your whole body is full of light with no part dark, the whole will be full of light
    • That state is like when a lamp gives you light with its shining
37. 11:37
    • As he spoke, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him
    • He went in
    • He reclined at the table
38. 11:38
    • The Pharisee saw it
    • The Pharisee marveled that Jesus had not first washed before the meal
39. 11:39
    • The Lord said to him
    • The Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and the platter
    • Their inward part is full of robbery and wickedness
40. 11:40
    • He called them fools
    • He asked whether the one who made the outside did not also make the inside
41. 11:41
    • He tells them to give as alms the things that are within
    • He says that then all things are clean to them
42. 11:42
    • He pronounces woe on the Pharisees
    • They tithe mint
    • They tithe rue
    • They tithe every herb
    • They pass over justice
    • They pass over the love of God
    • They ought to have done justice and the love of God
    • They ought not to have left the tithing undone
43. 11:43
    • He pronounces woe on the Pharisees
    • They love the chief seats in the synagogues
    • They love greetings in the marketplaces
44. 11:44
    • He pronounces woe on the scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites
    • They are like graves that are not visible
    • The men who walk over such graves are not aware of them
45. 11:45
    • One of the lawyers answered him
    • The lawyer addressed him as Master
    • The lawyer said that by saying these things he insults the lawyers also
46. 11:46
    • He said woe to the lawyers also
    • They load men with burdens hard to bear
    • They themselves do not touch the burdens with one of their fingers
47. 11:47
    • He pronounces woe on them
    • They build the tombs of the prophets
    • Their fathers killed the prophets
48. 11:48
    • They bear witness to and consent to the deeds of their fathers
    • Their fathers killed the prophets
    • They build the prophets' tombs
49. 11:49
    • For this reason the wisdom of God said something
    • The wisdom of God said it will send them prophets and apostles
    • The wisdom of God said they will kill some of them
    • The wisdom of God said they will persecute some of them
50. 11:50
    • The blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world may be required of this generation
51. 11:51
    • The reckoning runs from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zacharias
    • Zacharias perished between the altar and the house of God
    • Jesus says verily to them
    • It will be required of this generation
52. 11:52
    • He pronounces woe on the lawyers
    • They have taken away the key of knowledge
    • They did not enter in themselves
    • They hindered those who were entering in
53. 11:53
    • As he said these things to them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him vehemently
    • They began to provoke him to speak about many things
54. 11:54
    • They lay in wait for him
    • They sought to catch something out of his mouth
    • The King James adds that their purpose was to accuse him

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

11:1

"John" is John the Baptist, the preacher of Luke 3 who had his own circle of followers. Teachers of the time often gave their disciples a short prayer of their own, which served as a kind of badge of the group; the request is for one of those.

11:2

"Hallowed" is an old English word meaning treated as holy, set apart. A person's "name" in this idiom stands for the person himself and his reputation, so the line asks that God himself be held in honor. "Thy kingdom" is not a territory but God's rule actually taking effect. The earliest manuscripts of Luke have simply "Father" here and do not contain "which art in heaven" or "Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth"; the KJV follows later copies in which Luke's shorter prayer had been filled out to match the longer version in Matthew 6.

11:3

The Greek word behind "daily" is so rare that it is almost unknown outside this prayer, and its sense is genuinely uncertain. It has been read as "needed to live," "for today," and "for the day ahead." "Bread" here means food generally, the day's rations.

11:4

"Indebted to us" is literal: debt was the standard image for a wrong owed and not yet settled, and Jesus uses the two words interchangeably in this verse. "Temptation" translates a word meaning a test or trial of any kind, not only an enticement to do wrong; it covers being put through an ordeal. The closing words "but deliver us from evil" are absent from the oldest manuscripts of Luke and appear to have been carried over from Matthew's version.

11:5

Bread was baked fresh each day in small quantities, so a household would not have a surplus at midnight; three loaves means enough for one guest's meal. The loaves were flat rounds, not the modern loaf.

11:6

Feeding an unexpected traveler was a binding social obligation, and failure fell on the whole village, not just the host. That is why the man can wake a neighbor at midnight and expect to be heard.

11:7

A village house was often a single room where the family slept together on mats on a raised platform, with the animals below. The door was closed with a heavy wooden bar that had to be lifted, so getting up meant waking everyone.

11:8

"Importunity" in 1611 meant persistent, nagging pressure. The Greek word underneath it is anaideia, literally "shamelessness," and commentators divide over whom it describes: the asker who will not stop knocking, or the sleeper who wants to avoid the disgrace of having refused a neighbor.

11:11

The comparisons work by resemblance. A small flat loaf looks much like a smooth stone, and some eel-like fish in the Sea of Galilee look like snakes. The point is a father handing over something that looks right but is useless or dangerous.

11:12

A pale scorpion with its legs and tail folded in is roughly egg-shaped and about egg-sized, which is what makes the swap conceivable.

11:13

"Being evil" is not an insult thrown at the crowd so much as one half of a standard argument: if the lesser case holds, the greater case holds all the more. Ordinary flawed parents manage this much, so God will manage more.

11:14

Where the KJV says "devil" it almost always translates the Greek word for demon, a lesser hostile spirit, not Satan himself. "Dumb" in 1611 meant unable to speak and carried no suggestion of stupidity; the condition is attributed to the spirit.

11:15

Beelzebub is a mocking name of long standing. It appears in 2 Kings 1 as the god of the Philistine city Ekron, and the form used by the earliest Greek manuscripts here, Beelzebul, can be read as "lord of the dwelling," which is why the reply in verses 17 to 26 plays on houses and kingdoms.

11:16

"Tempting him" here means putting him to the test. A "sign from heaven" is not another healing but a public portent in the sky, the kind of unmistakable display that would settle the argument about where his power came from.

11:17

"House" carries its ancient double sense of the building and the family living in it, including its wealth, its servants and its future. A house divided is a family tearing itself apart, and in a world where survival depended on kin, that meant ruin.

11:19

"Your sons" means your own people, fellow Jews who also practiced exorcism. The argument is that if driving out demons proves a pact with Satan, it proves it of their own exorcists too.

11:20

"The finger of God" is a quotation. In Exodus 8 the Egyptian magicians fail to match a plague and tell Pharaoh, "This is the finger of God." The phrase means God acting directly, with nothing of his own strength required.

11:21

The word the KJV renders "palace" means a walled courtyard or the fortified house it belonged to, not a royal residence. The picture is an armed householder guarding his own compound.

11:22

Stripping a defeated enemy of his weapons and armor and then splitting the captured goods among the winners was standard practice after a fight. The picture is a raid, and the loser's armor was exactly what he had trusted to make the raid impossible.

11:23

"Gathereth" and "scattereth" are herding and harvest words, used of bringing a flock together or bringing a crop in. There is no neutral third position in the image.

11:24

Waterless desert was widely thought of as the natural haunt of unclean spirits, a place outside settled human life. The spirit is homeless there, which is why it goes looking for lodging.

11:25

"Garnished" in 1611 meant furnished or set in order, with no connection to the modern garnish on a plate. The house is tidy but unoccupied, and that is the point of the image.

11:26

Seven is the standard number for a full or complete set, so the phrase means the man is thoroughly overrun, not that an exact count of eight spirits is in view.

11:27

"Paps" is the old English word for breasts. Praising a man by blessing the mother who bore and nursed him was a conventional form of compliment, aimed at him rather than at her.

11:29

"This generation" means the people alive at the time, taken as a body. Jonah was the prophet sent to preach to the foreign city of Nineveh; in Luke the sign is Jonah himself, a preacher arriving with a warning, rather than his three days inside the fish.

11:30

Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, the empire that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, which is what makes its people a pointed comparison. "Son of man" is the way Jesus habitually refers to himself in the Gospels; in ordinary Hebrew and Aramaic it can simply mean a human being, but it also echoes the mysterious figure given lasting authority in Daniel 7, and the phrase keeps both senses in play.

11:31

The "queen of the south" is the queen of Sheba, in southern Arabia, who traveled to Jerusalem to hear Solomon's wisdom in 1 Kings 10. To "rise up in the judgment" is courtroom language: she stands as a witness whose conduct shows up the conduct of those on trial.

11:32

"Nineve" is the KJV's spelling of Nineveh. The book of Jonah reports that the whole city turned from its wrongdoing when he preached, and it had none of the advantages of a people who already had the scriptures.

11:33

A "candle" in 1611 English meant any small light, and the object here is a clay oil lamp set on a stand. The "bushel" is a household grain measure of roughly two gallons, an upturned bowl big enough to smother the flame. The "secret place" is a cellar or storage vault.

11:34

The Greek word behind "single" means sound or undivided, and in ordinary usage it also carried the sense of generous. Its opposite, the "evil eye," was a common idiom for stinginess and grudging looks. Ancient thinking often pictured the eye as letting light into the body rather than taking light in, which is why the eye can be called the body's lamp.

11:37

Guests at a formal meal lay propped on the left elbow on low couches around a table rather than sitting on chairs, so "sat down to meat" means took his place on the couch. "Meat" in 1611 meant food of any kind.

11:38

The washing at issue is a ritual rinsing of the hands before eating, a purity custom the Pharisees observed and extended to ordinary meals. It was not about dirt, and skipping it was not a lapse in hygiene but a refusal of the practice.

11:39

Pharisaic purity rules dealt in detail with when a vessel counted as clean and whether the inside or outside mattered, so the image is drawn from live debate. "Ravening" in 1611 meant plunder or rapacious greed, the behavior of a predator.

11:41

"Alms" are gifts of money or food to the poor, a central religious duty. The Greek of this verse is notoriously hard: it reads roughly "give the things inside as alms," and translators divide over whether it means give away the contents of the dish or give away what is inside you.

11:42

The law required a tenth of field crops to be set aside; extending the count to tiny quantities of garden herbs was scrupulousness beyond what the law asked. Rue is a small bitter-smelling herb used in cooking and medicine. "Judgment" in the KJV here means justice, fair dealing in disputes.

11:43

The "uppermost seats" are the bench at the front of the synagogue, facing the congregation with the scripture scrolls behind, where the honored sat in full view. The "greetings in the markets" are the formal public salutations by title that marked a man out as important in front of everyone.

11:44

Contact with a grave made a person ritually unclean for seven days under Numbers 19, so tombs were whitewashed to be seen and avoided. An unmarked grave defiled people who had no idea it was there, which is the sting of the comparison. "Scribes" are the professional students and copyists of the law, its recognized scholars, not clerks.

11:45

"Lawyers" here has nothing to do with courts and civil law. The word means specialists in the Law of Moses, the same group the KJV elsewhere calls scribes or doctors of the law. "Master" in 1611 means teacher.

11:46

"Lade" means to load, as with a pack animal. The burdens are rulings on how the law is to be kept in daily life, and the complaint is about who carries the weight of them.

11:47

Building and decorating monuments over the graves of the prophets was a live practice in the first century, understood as honoring them. The sentence turns that honor around: the same families are on both ends of the transaction.

11:48

"Allow" in 1611 meant approve of or consent to, which is nearly the opposite of the modern sense of merely permitting. The argument is bitter and deliberate: your ancestors buried them, you finish the tomb, so you are completing their work rather than distancing yourself from it.

11:49

"The wisdom of God said" introduces a quotation, but no surviving book contains these words. Readers have proposed a lost writing, a free summary of the Old Testament as a whole, or Jesus speaking as Wisdom himself; Luke does not say.

11:50

To have blood "required" of you is legal language for being held liable for a killing and made to answer for it. "From the foundation of the world" means since creation.

11:51

These are the first and last murders in the Hebrew Bible as the Jewish scriptures were then ordered, which runs from Genesis to Chronicles, so the phrase means all of them from beginning to end. Abel is killed by his brother in Genesis 4. Zacharias is Zechariah son of Jehoiada, stoned to death in the temple courtyard in 2 Chronicles 24. "Between the altar and the temple" places it between the altar for burnt offerings, which stood in the open court, and the sanctuary building behind it.

11:52

The image is of a doorkeeper holding the key to a house. These men controlled access to the scriptures by their teaching, so the charge is that they have pocketed the key rather than opened the door.

11:53

"Urge him vehemently" translates a word for pressing hard and hostilely, and the questioning that follows is not curiosity. The aim, as verse 54 says outright, is to get him on record saying something actionable.