What Does Luke 15:25 Mean?

(25) **He heard musick and dancing.**—This brings in a new feature. The father, like the chief actors in the other parables, had called together his “friends and neighbours,” and they were rejoicing after the manner of the East. There was “musick,” literally, a *symphony,* or *concert,* implying voices as well as instruments. The word occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, but it is found in the LXX. version of Daniel 3:5; Daniel 3:10, Where indeed the Hebrew, or rather the Aramaic, word is but the Greek transliterated. The word for “dancing,” also, is found here only in the New Testament, and is the same as that used, in classical Greek, for the chorus of the Greek drama, and from which we get our English “choir.” It probably implied, *i.e.,* song as well as dancing. Spiritually, these outward signs of gladness answer to the overflowing demonstrative joy which thrills through the hearts of those whose sympathies with God’s work in the souls of men are keen and strong, and to which those who live only in the colder religionism of outward service are so insensible that they cannot understand it. They ask now, as the elder son asked, as the Pharisees were in their hearts asking, what it means? Why this departure from the even tenor of men’s wonted life?