Mark 7:25-30 For a certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell at his feet:… is emphasized by the Evangelists with a variety of expressions. She is characterized vaguely as "a Greek," not in the limited sense with which we are most familiar, but as a genuine term for non-Jewish people, very much as the Turks and Asiatics adopt the designation of "Frank" for any European. Her personal name has come down through tradition as Justs, and that of her daughter as Bernice. She is called by St. Matthew "a woman of Canaan" — an inhabitant of the region into which those who escaped extermination had been shut up; and the title may have been selected to enhance the loving kindness of the Lord, not without reference to her inheritance of the ancient malediction, "Cursed be Canaan." She is also called here a Syro-Phoenician by descent, probably to distinguish her from those Libyo-Phoenicians in the northern coasts of Africa, whom the fame of Carthage had made so widely known. She was, no doubt, in religion a heathen, but was possessed by principles which, when called into active exercise by the Great Teacher, served her in better stead than the orthodox creed did not a few of its professors. (H. M. Luckock, D. D.)She was a heathen in religion, an alien in race, a dweller in a city hardly surpassable for antiquity, enterprise, wealth, or wickedness. She had been doubtless a worshipper of the Syrian goddess whose worship covered the Levant; the deity who personified the fulness of Divine life which fills the world; who was loved by the purest because they deemed her the giver of their children; and yet worshipped with loathsome devotion by the vilest because she was supposed to sanction all action of human lust. A Hindoo mother, worshipping Doorga, in her brighter aspect, reproduces exactly the sort of feeling and devotion in which this woman had been reared. She was thus ill placed, for the favourite deity corrupted the morals of the people exactly in the degree they worshipped her. Yet her faith receives a tribute of highest praise from her Saviour, and she is, I suppose, the first heathen converted to the faith and the salvation of the Son of God. (R. Glover.) Parallel Verses KJV: For a certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell at his feet: |
    |