Luke 16:24

ὕδατος. The partitive genitive—‘in some water.’ But he who refused the crumbs is denied the drops.

ὀδυνῶμαι. ‘I am suffering pain.’ The verb is not βασανίζομαι. See Luke 2:48, where ὀδυνῶμαι is rendered ‘sorrowing.’

ἐν τῇ φλογὶ ταύτη. Perhaps meant to indicate the agony of remorseful memories. In Hades no

“Lethe the river of oblivion rolls:
Her watery labyrinth, whereof who drinks
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.”

As for the material flame and the burning tongue, “we may,” says Archbishop Trench, “safely say that the form in which the sense of pain, with the desire after alleviation, embodies itself, is figurative.” Even the fierce and gloomy Tertullian says that how to understand what is meant by these details “is scarcely perhaps discovered by those who inquire with gentleness, but by contentious controversialists never.”