Forty days and forty nights. — Here we have an obvious parallelism with the fasts of Moses (Exodus 34:28) and Elijah (1 Kings 19:8), and we may well think of it as deliberately planned. Prolonged fasts of nearly the same extent have been recorded in later times. The effect of such a fast on any human organism, and therefore on our Lord’s real humanity, would be to interrupt the ordinary continuity of life, and quicken all perceptions of the spiritual world into a new intensity. It may be noted that St. Luke describes the Temptation as continuing through the whole period, so that what is recorded was but the crowning conflict, gathering into one the struggles by which it had been preluded. The one feature peculiar to St. Mark (who omits the specific history of the temptations), that our Lord “was with the wild beasts” (Mark 1:13). suggests that their presence, their yells of hunger, their ravening fierceness, their wild glaring eyes, had left, as it were, an ineffable and ineffaceable impression of horror, in addition to the terrors and loneliness of the wilderness as such.
He was afterward an hungred. — The words imply a partial return to the common life of sensation. The cravings of the body at last made themselves felt, and in them, together with the memory of the divine witness that had been borne forty days before, the Tempter found the starting-point of his first attack. Of that attack there may well have been preludes during the previous time of trial. Now it came more distinctly.