Luke 19:42 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

Bible Comments

If thou hadst known, even thou. — The emphatic repetition of the pronoun, as in Isaiah 48:15; Isaiah 51:12; Ezekiel 5:8; Ezekiel 6:3; Ps. ixxvi. 7, speaks of the strongest possible emotion. The broken form of the sentence, “If thou hadst known...,” with no corresponding clause as to what would then have followed; the “at least in this thy day,” the day that was still its own, in which it was called to repentance and action, all point to the words as being the utterance of the deepest human sorrow that the Son of Man had known.

The things which belong unto thy peace. — Literally, the things that make for, or tend to, peace. The Greek is the same as that translated “conditions of peace” in Luke 14:32 (where see Note); in this case, obviously, the “things that make for peace” are repentance, reformation, righteousness.

Now they are hid. — The Greek tense implies, by a distinction hard to express in English, in conjunction with the adverb “now,” that the concealment of the things that made for the peace of Jerusalem, was a thing completed in the past.

Luke 19:42

42 Saying,If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.