Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

2 Peter 2:8

2 Peter 2:8. for by sight and hearing that righteous man, dwelling among them from day to day, tortured his righteous soul with their unlawful deeds. A parenthetical explanation of how it was that Lot was ‘sore distressed.' The Vulgate, Erasmus, etc., strangely take the ‘sight and hearing' as definitions of the directions in which Lot was righteous. The point, however, manifestly is, that the soreness of his distress was due to the fact that, living among these wicked men, he had the protracted pain of seeing with his own eyes and hearing with his own ears day after day things against which his soul revolted. The strong term ‘tortured' or ‘tormented' (cf. such occurrences of the same term as Matthew 8:6; Matthew 8:29; Mark 5:7; Luke 8:28; Revelation 9:5; Revelation 11:10; Revelation 14:10, Rev. 20:20, etc.), and the repetition of the moral epithet in ‘that righteous man' and ‘his righteous soul,' exhibit the pain as the acute pain due to natural repulsion. Nothing is said here of the faultiness ascribed to Lot's action by the narrative of Genesis, or of the way in which he came to live among these men. Everything is done to present a telling picture of a righteous man thrown into godless society, and not suffering the edge of his righteous feeling to become blunted by lengthened familiarity with the coarse licentiousness of neighbours who mocked at the restraints of all law, human and Divine, but undergoing daily torment from sights and sounds which he was helpless to arrest.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

2 Peter 2:8

Old Testament

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