John 7:53
Then each went to his own home.
BSB
Parallel translations (2) ▾
ASV
[And they went every man unto his own house:
KJV
And every man went unto his own house.
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A note on the manuscripts
Most scholars agree
The Woman Caught in Adultery
One of the most beloved stories about Jesus is missing from the earliest copies of John, and in the later copies that have it, it does not stay in one place.
What it changes: No doctrine. Nothing taught in these twelve verses is unique to them. The mercy of Jesus toward the guilty, his refusal to be used as a weapon, his call to repentance that follows rather than replaces forgiveness, all of it runs through the whole of the Gospels. Luke 7:36-50 alone carries the same weight.
Commentary
1 voiceVoices on this verse
loading…Hebraic traditional view
The water ceremony He interrupted
“The Feast of Booths” is Tabernacles, in Hebrew Sukkot: the autumn week when Israel lived (and Jewish families still eat) in leafy shelters remembering the wilderness. In Temple times each morning of the feast a priest carried water in gold from the pool of Siloam up to the altar and poured it out, praying for the year's rain, while the crowds sang: the Mishnah calls it the Rejoicing at the Place of the Water-Drawing, and the Talmud says whoever never saw it “has never seen rejoicing in his life” (Sukkah 51a).
That is the scene on “the last day of the feast, the great day,” when Jesus stood and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink”: a claim staged inside the feast's own ceremony, at the moment all Jerusalem was thinking about water from God.
Sources: Mishnah Sukkah 4:9 (the water-drawing rite) · Sukkah 51a (“has never seen rejoicing”)
Original language & word study
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About John
