Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 4:2

"And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he afterward hungered." — Matthew 4:2 (ASV)

Here we see an obvious parallel with the fasts of Moses (Exodus 34:28) and Elijah (1 Kings 19:8), and we may well think of it as deliberately planned. Prolonged fasts of nearly the same duration have been recorded in later times. The effect of such a fast on any human organism, and therefore on our Lord’s real humanity, would be to interrupt the ordinary continuity of life and heighten all perceptions of the spiritual world to a new intensity.

It should be noted that Luke describes the temptation as continuing through the entire period, so what is recorded was only the crowning conflict, gathering into one the struggles that preceded it. The one feature unique to Mark (who omits the specific history of the temptations)—that our Lord was with the wild beasts (Mark 1:13)—suggests that their presence, their yells of hunger, their ravening fierceness, and their wild, glaring eyes had left an ineffable and indelible impression of horror, in addition to the terrors and loneliness of the wilderness itself.

He was afterward an hungred.—These words imply a partial return to the common life of sensation. The cravings of the body finally made themselves felt, and in them, together with the memory of the divine witness given forty days before, the Tempter found the starting point for his first attack. There may well have been preludes to that attack during the previous time of trial; now, it came more distinctly.