And rose up
In great wrath, and, in a noisy and tumultuous manner, before the
service was well over, and without being regularly dismissed:
and thrust him out of the city;
first out of the synagogue, and then out of their city, as
unworthy to be in it, though an inhabitant of it; and as if he
had done something deserving of death; and therefore to be
punished as a malefactor without the city:
and led him unto the brow of the hill;
the edge of it, where it run out, and hung over the precipice:
whereon their city was built;
so that it was a city upon an hill, and very visible, to which
Christ may allude in ( Matthew 5:14
) . That they might cast him down headlong; and break him to
pieces: in this manner ten thousand Edomites were destroyed by
the Jews, in the times of Amaziah, ( 2
Chronicles 25:12 ) though this was not an usual way with the
Jews of putting persons to death, as with some other nations
F21; their four capital punishments
were stoning, strangling, burning, and killing with the sword
F23: nor did the inhabitants of
Nazareth proceed in any judicial manner with Christ, but hurried
him away, in order to destroy him, without any formal process, in
the manner the zealots did; though to put any man to death, or to
inflict any punishment on a person on the sabbath day, as this
was, was contrary to their own canon, which runs thus F24;
``they do not inflict punishment on the sabbath day, even though it is the punishment of an affirmative precept; they do not beat one that is guilty, nor put to death, as it is said, ( Exodus 35:3 ) "ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day": this is a caution to the sanhedrim, that they do not burn on the sabbath day he that is condemned to burning; and this is the law with respect to any one that is liable to the other punishments.''But these men, without any regard to the place where they were, and the worship they were concerned in, and the day of the sabbath which then was, rise up in great wrath and fury, and without any show of justice, and in the most brutish and barbarous manner attempt to take away the life of Christ.