Luke 16:6 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

Take thy bill, and sit down quickly. — The better MSS. give, thy bills, or thy documents, in the plural. These would include that which answered to the modern lease, the contract which specified the rent, and probably also the memorandum of the due delivery of the annual share of the produce. In this case the measure is the Hebrew bath, which has been variously estimated, the data being uncertain and conflicting, at from one to three gallons to the higher number stated in the marginal note. The steward by thus tempting the debtors with an immediate gain, and making them sharers in his frauds, took the readiest and most direct means of securing at once their favour and their silence. That which answered to this in the first application of the parable was the conduct of the Pharisees, just in proportion as they lost the moral force which they had once exercised, in accommodating their casuistry to the selfishness of their followers. Thus by their Corban teaching (see Note on Matthew 15:5) they released men from the obligation of supporting parents, and made perjury easy by their artificial distinctions as to oaths (Matthew 5:33; Matthew 23:16-22), gave a wide license to lust by their doctrine of divorce (Matthew 5:31; Matthew 19:3), and substituted the paying tithes of mint, and anise, and cummin for the weightier matters of the Law (Matthew 23:23). Like phenomena have been seen in analogous circumstances in the history of the Christian Church. When Leo X. sent forth his preachers of indulgences with their short and easy methods of salvation; when Jesuit confessors were to be found in every court of Europe, doing nothing to preserve their votaries from a fathomless licentiousness; when Protestant theologians tuned their voice according to the time, and pandered to the passions of a Henry VIII. or a Landgrave of Hesse; when the preachers of justification by faith turned the grace of God into lasciviousness, or made it compatible with a life of money-making worldliness; when men lower the standard of duty to gain support and popularity — there the act of the steward in bidding the debtor write fifty measures, when he owed a hundred, finds its counterpart.