Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them, think you that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?
All Commentaries on Luke 13:4 Go To Luke 13
Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
Or of those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell. There was a fountain, or rather pool, near Jerusalem of which Isaiah speaks, "This people refuses the waters of Shiloah that go softly," Isaiah 8:6. Near this fountain was a tower also called Siloë, from it, which in the time of Christ fell down, either from the force of the wind, or from lightning, or an earthquake, or some other like cause, and destroyed eighteen persons who were either in it, or standing near. This, if we only regard secondary causes, may have happened by chance; but if we consider the one primary one, that Isaiah , God, it was done by His appointed Providence, who determines to punish some and to terrify others. For with God nothing is fortuitous, but everything is certainly foreseen and prepared, that nothing in His Kingdom should, as Boethius says, be ascribed to chance or temerity. God, then, orders these events for the chastisement and correction of Prayer of Manasseh , that others, seeing their neighbours killed by the fall of a tower or some other sudden accident, may fear lest something similar happen to themselves, and so may repent and reconcile themselves to God, lest they be overwhelmed by His judgments and condemned to Gehenna. This is what God said by the prophet Amos , "Shall there be evil in the city, and the Lord hath not done it?" Isaiah 3:6; and by Isaiah , "I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil" Isa 45:7. The poets and philosophers saw the same through a shade:
—0 qui res hominumque Deumque,
ternis regis imperiis, et fulmine terres.
"0 Thou who dost the affairs
Of men and gods, by laws eternal rule,
And by thy lightning fierce dost terrify."
And Plutarch (In Moral.), "As if a blind man should fall against a person, and call that person blind for not avoiding him, so we make Fortune blind, whereas we stumble against her from our own want of sight. For this very "Fortuna fortunans," which Isaiah , in truth, no other than God Himself, and the Providence of God is most keen of sight, and has many more eyes than Argus."
Symbolically. "The tower," says Bede, "is Christ, Silo, that Isaiah , He who is sent by the Father into the world, and who crushes to powder all the wicked upon whom He falls, through the sentence of His condemnation."
Think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? "Sinners"—the Arabic has culpabiles; the Chaldaic, chare bim, i.e. debtors (for a debtor owes his soul, that Isaiah 10 ,000 talents, S. Matt. xviii24 , to God). Christ shows clearly that these eighteen who were killed by the fall of the tower of Siloam, were sinners, though not, perhaps, the worst and greatest that were in Jerusalem.
