Charles Ellicott Commentary Luke 16:21

"and desiring to be fed with the [crumbs] that fell from the rich man`s table; yea, even the dogs come and licked his sores." — Luke 16:21 (ASV)

And desiring to be fed with the crumbs. The habits of the East, the absence of knives, forks, and the like, made the amount of waste of this kind larger than do the habits of modern Europe. (Compare to the language of the Syrophoenician woman, in Mark 7:28.) Here the picture is heightened by two touches.

The dogs are there and get the crumbs, which the man fails to get, and then they come and lick the open sores.

The question has been raised whether this touch is meant to intensify the sufferings of the beggar, or to contrast the almost human sympathy of the brute with the brutal apathy of the man. In a European apologue the latter might, perhaps, be a legitimate explanation of the fact thus stated; but with Eastern feelings, which view the dog as an unclean beast, the scavenger of the streets, we cannot doubt that the beggar would have shrunk from their licking, even assuming (which is doubtful) that it brought with it some relief from merely physical pain.

It may be noted, too, that the word for “dogs” is not the diminutive form used in Matthew 15:27 and Mark 7:28, which implied tameness, but that which is always associated with the idea of abhorrence (Matthew 7:6; Philippians 3:2; 2 Peter 2:22; Revelation 22:15).