23, 24. Sickness, Disease, Torments, Taken, Lunatic. The description of the ailments to which our Lord's power was applied gains in vividness by study of the words in detail. In ver. 23, the Rev. rightly transposes sickness and disease; for nosov (A.V., sickness) carries the notion of something severe, dangerous, and even violent (compare the Latin noceo, to hurt, to which the root is akin). Homer always represents nosov as the visitation of an angry deity. Hence used of the plague which Apollo sent upon the Greeks ("Iliad," i. 10). So Sophocles ("Antigone," 421) calls a whirlwind qeian noson (a divine visitation). Disease is, therefore, the more correct rendering as expressing something stronger than sickness or debility. Sickness, however, suits the other word, malakian. The kindred adjective, malakov, means soft, as a couch or newly-ploughed furrow, and thus easily runs into our invidious moral sense of softness, namely, effeminacy or cowardice, and into the physical sense of weakness, sickness. Hence the word emphasizes the idea of debility rather than of violet suffering or danger.

In ver. 24 we have, first, a general expression for ailments of all kinds: all that were sick (lit., all who had themselves in evil case; pantav touv kakwv econtav). Then the idea of suffering is emphasized in the word taken (sunexomenouv), which means literally held-together or compressed; and so the Rev. holden is an improvement on taken, in which the A.V. has followed Wyc. and Tyn. The word is used of the multitude thronging Christ (Luke viii. 45). Compare, also, "how I am straitened (Luke xii. 50); and I am in a strait (Philip. i. 23). Then follow the specific forms of suffering, the list headed again by the inclusive word nosoiv, diseases, and the kai following having the force of and particularly. Note the word torments (basanoiv). basanovoriginally meant the "Lydian stone," or touchstone, on which pure gold, when rubbed, leaves a peculiar mark. Hence, naturally, a test; then a test or trial by torture. "Most words," says Professor Campbell ("On the Language of Sophocles") "have been originally metaphors, and metaphors are continually falling into the rank of words," used by the writer as mere vehicles of expression without any sense of the picturesque or metaphorical element at their core. Thus the idea of a test gradually passes entirely out of basanov, leaving merely the idea of suffering or torture. This is peculiarly noticeable in the use of this word and its derivatives throughout the New Testament; for although suffering as a test is a familiar New Testament truth, these words invariably express simply torment or pain. Wycliffe renders, "They offered to him all men having evil, taken with divers sorrows and torments;" and Tyndale, "All sick people that were taken with divers diseases and gripings." Lunatic, or moon-struck, (selhniazomenouv), is rendered by Rev. epileptic, with reference to the real or supposed influence of the changes of the moon upon the victims of epilepsy.

Robertson's NT Word Studies