The temptation account is short, structurally tidy, and does specific work. All three refusals are answered with quotations from Deuteronomy, from the section about Israel's own forty years in the wilderness, which is the point: where the people failed the test, this one does not. The three offers are read by the tradition as the three standing temptations of religion itself — provision, spectacle and power — and they have been used as a mirror against the church's own record with some force, most famously in Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, which argues that the church accepted all three offers on humanity's behalf and was right to. Lent takes its forty days from this passage, and the practical shape of Lenten discipline in every tradition — fasting, refusal of display, giving away rather than accumulating — maps onto the three refusals in order.