Matthew 20:12

The omission of ὅτι after λέγοντες is on the best evidence (אBC2DI versions and fathers).

12. μίαν ὥραν ἐποίησαν. Cp. Acts 15:33, ποιήσαντες δὲ χρόνον�. So facere in Latin, ‘quamvis autem paucissimos una fecerimus dies tamen multi nobis sermones fuerunt.’ Seneca, Epist. 67.

ὥραν. ‘During the residence in Babylon the Hebrews adopted the division of the day into twelve hours whose duration varied with the length of the day.’ Edersheim, Temple, &c., in the Time of our Lord, p. 174).

τοῖς βαστάσασι τὸ βάρος τῆς ἡμέρας καὶ τὸν καύσωνα. This may be regarded as man’s estimate of his own merits, which is not the divine estimate. The words echo the tone of ‘what shall we have?’ ch. Matthew 19:27. Man does not here acquiesce in the Judge’s decision, as in the parable of the debtors, ch. 18. What is just does not at first seem just, but, as in science many things that seemed untrue are proved to be true, what seems unjust will be proved just when we know all. Further, time is not the only element in service. An act of swift intelligence or of bravery wrought in the space of a single minute has saved an army or a people, and merited higher reward than a lifetime of ordinary service; a Romaic proverb says: τὰ φέρνει ἡ ὥρα ὁ χρόνος δὲν τὰ φέρνει, ‘what an hour brings, a year brings not.’

βαστάσασι. Geldart, Mod. Greek Lang. pp. 191, 192, notices the frequent occurrence of βαστάζειν in N.T. as a modernism. No word has a longer literary history, it occurs in almost every Greek writer, from Homer to the N.T.

τὸ βάρος τῆς ἡμέρας καὶ τὸν καύσωνα. ‘The burden of the day and the hot morning wind.’ καύσωνα, emphatic by its position at the end of the sentence, heightens the effect of the picture, and gives reality to it. The labourers hired in the cool evening hours would escape the long toil, and what is more the scorching sirocco which blows from the desert at sunrise. Cp. ἀνέτειλεν γὰρ ὁ ἥλιος σὺν τῷ καύσωνι, James 1:11. It was from the combined influence of sun and sirocco that Jonah ‘fainted and wished himself to die:’ καὶ ἐγένετο ἅμα τῷ�. Jonah 4:8. See also Psalms 103:16 and Isaiah 40:6, and read Dr Thomson’s account of the two kinds of sirocco (Land and Book, pp. 536, 537). Describing the effect of the sultry sirocco he says: ‘The birds hide in thickest shades; the fowls pant under the walls with open mouth and drooping wings; the flocks and herds take shelter in caves and under great rocks; the labourers retire from the fields, and close the windows and doors of their houses.’