Luke 1:15
Context1:15 for he will be great in the sight of 1 the Lord. He 2 must never drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even before his birth. 3
Luke 16:3
Context16:3 Then 4 the manager said to himself, ‘What should I do, since my master is taking my position 5 away from me? I’m not strong enough to dig, 6 and I’m too ashamed 7 to beg.
1 tn Grk “before.”
2 tn Grk “and he”; because of the length and complexity of the Greek sentence, the conjunction καί (kai) has not been translated here. Instead a new English sentence is begun in the translation.
3 tn Grk “even from his mother’s womb.” While this idiom may be understood to refer to the point of birth (“even from his birth”), Luke 1:41 suggests that here it should be understood to refer to a time before birth.
sn He will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even before his birth. This is the language of the birth of a prophet (Judg 13:5, 7; Isa 49:1; Jer 1:5; Sir 49:7); see 1:41 for the first fulfillment.
4 tn Here δέ (de) has been translated as “then” to indicate the implied sequence of events in the parable.
5 tn Grk “the stewardship,” “the management.”
6 tn Here “dig” could refer (1) to excavation (“dig ditches,” L&N 19.55) or (2) to agricultural labor (“work the soil,” L&N 43.3). In either case this was labor performed by the uneducated, so it would be an insult as a job for a manager.
7 tn Grk “I do not have strength to dig; I am ashamed to beg.”
sn To beg would represent a real lowering of status for the manager, because many of those whom he had formerly collected debts from, he would now be forced to beg from.