John 11:39 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Jesus said, Take ye away the stone.— Our Lord could with infinite ease have commanded the stone to roll away of itself,without employing any to remove it. But he judiciously avoided all unnecessary pomp and parade, and mingled all the majestyof this astonishing miracle with the most amiable modesty and simplicity. Besides, he thus removed every the minutest suspicion of fraud; for they who removed the stone would have, from the putrified state of the body, sufficient evidence that it was there; while all who were present might, and no doubt did, see it lying in the sepulchre, when the stone was removed, before Jesus gave the commanding word, Come forth. Martha, yet weak in faith, yet struggling with doubt, in a painful agitation, with a variety of passions, says to Jesus, "Lord, it will be offensive to thee; the putrified body of my dear dead brother cannot be fit for thee to approach; by this time he certainly smelleth,— οζει,— for he hath been four days in the grave;" not four days dead only, as we render it; for the word dead is not in the original, being improperly supplied by the translators— τεταρταιος, quatriduanus, one who has continued in any state or place four days. Martha's meaning therefore was, that her brother had been in the grave four days, as is plain likewise from John 11:17. The gracious providence of God directed Martha to mention this circumstance before Lazarus was raised, that the greatness of the miracle might be manifest to all who were present: for if her brother had been buried four days, he must have been dead at least five; for we are to remember that in those hot countries, the dead sooner grow offensive, and cannot be kept so long unburied as with us. Dead bodies, says Dr. Hammond, after a revolution of the humours, which is completed in seventy-two hours, naturally tend to putrefaction; and the Jews say that by the fourth day after death, the body is so altered that one cannot be sure it is such a person.