Luke 16:5 Commentary and Bible Study

So he puts the plan into action: to buy the favour of his master’s debtors, at his master’s expense. The first debtor owes for a hundred measures of oil. If the experts are right, that is nearly a thousand gallons of pure olive oil. These are big quantities. There are many debtors, the details of only two are mentioned, but the narrative implies there are many more. He halves the first debt so that the bill is fraudulently rewritten, and then he reduces the next by a considerable discount. He does the same with all of them, presumably. This is a big estate and there may have been one or two hundred debtors – cancelling a huge amount of debt. That would ingratiate this man, this steward, with all those debtors. The two example debtors know perfectly well what they owe; they tell him. Furthermore, it seems that the steward worked in such a way that the debtors too were implicated in the fraud, and would therefore not report him afterwards. They had written a bill detailing what they owed to his master, and he now produces this, and gets them to change it, and then pay up the reduced amount. Nobody will be able to spill the beans or disclose what has really happened, because they are all involved; it's in their handwriting.