Luke 5 Footnotes

5:19 Houses with tile roofs were uncommon, though not unknown, in first-century Palestine. It is not clear, however, if Luke was actually referring to a roof of baked clay tiles or to something else. The Greek word here translated “tiles” (keramoi) can mean “clay,” and Luke may have been merely referring to the common mud-clay roof, which seemed to be the case in Mk 2:4. Alternatively, Luke’s word choice may be an accommodation to his audience’s normal experience of Greco-Roman architecture, which included roof tiles, and only meant to express the idea that the men dug through the roof.