Matthew 11:23 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

And thou, Capernaum. — This city had already witnessed more of our Lord’s recorded wonders than any other. That of the nobleman’s son (John 4:46-54), of the demoniac (Mark 1:21-28), the man sick of the palsy (Matthew 9:1-8), of Peter’s wife’s mother and the many works that followed (Matthew 8:1-14), of the woman with the issue of blood, and of Jairus’s daughter (Matthew 9:18-26), of the centurion’s servant (Matthew 8:5-13), had all been wrought there, besides the unrecorded “signs” implied in Luke 4:23. In this sense, and not in any outward prosperity, had Capernaum been “exalted unto heaven.” All this, however, had been in vain, and therefore the sentence was passed on it that it should be “brought down to hell,” i.e., to Hades, the grave, not Gehenna. The words point, as the next verse shows, to the ultimate abasement of the guilty city in the day of judgment, but the words have had an almost literal fulfilment. A few ruins conjecturally identified mark the site of Capernaum. Not one stone is left upon the other in Chorazin and Bethsaida.