The Boundary Moves from the Hands to the Heart

“Came together” is synagontai, the verb that gives the word synagogue. This is the second party of scribes from Jerusalem in Mark; the first accused Jesus of having Beelzebub (3:22). Galilee is being watched from the capital, and the watchers now bring Pharisees with them.

“Defiled” is koinais, literally “common”, the opposite of holy or set apart. Mark explains the word at once, “that is to say, with unwashen”, because Gentile readers would not know that sense of “common”. Peter uses the same pair in Acts 10:14: “any thing that is common or unclean.”

“Oft” translates a variant reading, pykna. Most manuscripts have pygmē, “with the fist”, an obscure phrase that may mean washing with a cupped hand, up to the wrist, or with a fistful of water. The Law required hand-washing of priests serving at the altar (Exodus 30:19); extending it to every meal was the elders’ tradition.

The market was where one might brush against Gentiles or unclean goods. “Wash” is literally “baptize themselves”. “Pots” is xestōn, from the Latin sextarius, a pint measure. “Tables” is klinōn, the couches diners reclined on, and the word is missing from some manuscripts.

“Walk” is the key word. The Hebrew term for the rules of Jewish life, halakha, comes from halakh, to walk. The “tradition of the elders” is the body of oral teaching later written down in the Mishnah around AD 200, which has a whole tractate, Yadayim, “Hands”, on this washing.

“Esaias” is the Greek form of Isaiah’s name. “Hypocrites” is hypokritai, a Greek word for stage actors, men who speak from behind a mask; this is the only time Mark uses it. The quotation is Isaiah 29:13, and the lips against the heart is the prophet’s own contrast.

Jesus quotes Isaiah in the Greek Old Testament wording. The Hebrew of Isaiah 29:13 says only that “their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men”; the Greek sharpens it to “in vain do they worship me”. “Doctrines” here means teachings, as in 1:22.

“Laying aside” is aphentes, let go of, the verb used when the fishermen left their nets (1:18). “Hold” is krateite, grip fast, the verb for seizing a man under arrest. God’s commandment is dropped and the human tradition is clutched. The list at the end of the verse is missing from older manuscripts.

“Full well” is kalōs, fine, finely, and it is sarcastic. Verse 6 opened with the same word, “Well hath Esaias prophesied”, and the crowd will use it without irony in verse 37: “He hath done all things well.” “Reject” is athetite, to set aside or annul.

Jesus quotes the fifth commandment (Exodus 20:12) and its penalty clause (Exodus 21:17). “Die the death” renders a Hebrew doubling, mot yumat, “dying he shall die”, an emphatic way of saying surely. “Curseth” is kakologōn, speaks evil of.

Qorban comes from the Hebrew verb qarav, to draw near: what is brought near to the altar. Leviticus 1:2 uses it for any offering. An ossuary lid found near Jerusalem carries an inscription declaring that anything a man might gain from it is qorban to God, the very formula used to put property out of another’s reach.

Under the practice described, a vow once spoken bound the one who made it, even at his parents’ cost. The Mishnah (Nedarim 9:1) later records rabbis debating whether such a vow could be released for the sake of a parent’s honour, and Rabbi Eliezer said it could. Jewish teachers themselves were uneasy with the loophole.

“Tradition” and “delivered” share a root in Greek: paradosis, a handing on, and paredōkate, you handed on. “Of none effect” is akyrountes, the word for legally cancelling a contract or a will. The tradition is treated as having voided the commandment.

The crowd has been out of sight since the argument began in verse 1. Jesus turns from the experts to everyone and summons them: the answer to a dispute among specialists is given to the whole crowd.

The saying is built as two halves that mirror each other, from without and from within, entering and coming out. It is only one sentence, yet in verse 17 the disciples call it a “parable”, which shows how far that word stretched: to a riddle as well as a tale.

The verse is missing from the oldest manuscripts and may have been copied in from 4:9 and 4:23, where Jesus says the same after the sower. Where it stands, it marks the saying of verse 15 as one that needs ears to catch it.

The pattern of chapter 4 repeats: public saying, then a house, then questions in private (4:10, 4:34). “From the people” means away from the crowd. The disciples ask about the one-line saying as if it were a riddle, which in their hearing it is.

“Without understanding” is asynetoi, from the same root as the verb in 6:52, where the disciples “considered not” the loaves. “Also” stings: you too, like the crowd and the critics. The question expects the answer that yes, they are.

“Draught” in 1611 meant a privy or cesspit; 2 Kings 10:27 calls Jehu’s demolished temple of Baal “a draught house”. The Greek is aphedrōn, latrine. The route runs from mouth to belly to drain, with the heart never touched.

The second half of verse 15 comes again, and in Greek there is extra weight on the pronoun: “that, that is what defiles the man”. “And he said” marks a new start, so the repetition is deliberate rather than careless.

“Thoughts” is dialogismoi, the noun from the verb used of the scribes “reasoning in their hearts” in 2:6–8. The list begins with the thinking and then turns to deeds. In Greek the order is fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries; the King James follows manuscripts with a slightly different sequence.

Halfway through this verse, at “deceit”, the Greek list turns from plural nouns, repeated acts, to singular ones, settled dispositions. “An evil eye” is a Hebrew idiom for stinginess and envy: “thine eye be evil against thy poor brother” (Deuteronomy 15:9). “Lasciviousness” is aselgeia, open, unashamed excess.

“From within” brackets the whole list, used in verse 21 and again here. Thirteen evils are named, from “evil thoughts” to “foolishness”, and the last word is the fool of the wisdom books, who says in his heart there is no God (Psalm 14:1).

Tyre lay on the coast about thirty miles north-west of Capernaum, well outside Israel. Some manuscripts lack “and Sidon” here. It is the furthest from Israel that Jesus goes in Mark, and he goes into a house “and would have no man know it”, a withdrawal that fails at once.

“Young daughter” is thygatrion, the same diminutive Jairus used for his dying girl in 5:23. She too “fell at his feet”, as Jairus did. The ruler of a synagogue and a Gentile mother come to Jesus with the same need and in the same posture.

“Greek” here means Gentile and Greek-speaking, not from Greece. “Syrophenician” marks her as a Phoenician of the Roman province of Syria, as distinct from the Phoenicians of Carthage in North Africa. Matthew 15:22 calls her “a woman of Canaan”, the ancient name for Israel’s enemy. “Besought” is imperfect: she kept asking.

Tyre’s food came largely from Galilee; Acts 12:20 says the region “was nourished by the king’s country”, and Josephus calls the Tyrians Israel’s bitterest enemies. The scholar Gerd Theissen proposed that Galileans felt their bread went to Tyre. “Dogs” is kynaria, little dogs, house dogs rather than street scavengers, though how far the diminutive softens the word is debated.

“Lord” is kyrie. In the oldest manuscripts she is the only person in Mark to address Jesus this way; the father’s “Lord” in 9:24 comes from later copies, and Bartimaeus in 10:51 actually says Rabboni. “Crumbs” is psichiōn, the smallest scraps, the bits a child drops for the dog waiting under the table.

“For this saying” is literally “because of this word”. She is the only person in Mark who wins an argument with Jesus, and this is the only healing in the book done at a distance, with neither word spoken to the child nor touch.

“Laid upon the bed” uses ballō, to throw, the verb of “cast forth the devil” in verse 26 and of casting bread to the dogs in verse 27. The devil is cast out and the child lies cast on the bed, quiet at last. The bed is a klinē, a proper couch rather than a poor man’s mat.

The route is strange on a map. Older manuscripts read “departing from the coasts of Tyre, he came through Sidon”, north, and then south-east to the lake through the Decapolis. Some take it as a long circuit through Gentile country lasting months; others suspect Mark’s grasp of the geography.

“Had an impediment in his speech” is mogilalon, one who speaks with difficulty, a rare word that appears in the Greek Old Testament only in Isaiah 35:6, “the tongue of the dumb sing”. Mark reaches for the same word.

Spittle was a common remedy in the ancient world. Tacitus and Suetonius both report that the emperor Vespasian was asked to heal a blind man in Alexandria with his spittle. Fingers in the ears and a touch on the tongue tell a deaf man, without words, what is about to be done.

“Sighed” is estenaxen, groaned, the verb Paul uses for creation and believers groaning as they wait (Romans 8:22–23). “Looking up to heaven” repeats the gesture at the loaves in 6:41. Ephphatha is Aramaic, or possibly Hebrew, for “be opened”, a word the man could not hear but could see formed on the lips.

“The string of his tongue” is desmos, a bond or fetter. The same word appears in ancient binding spells that aimed to tie up a person’s tongue, and scholars have noted the language: the tongue is not trained but unbound. “Plain” is orthōs, correctly.

In the Decapolis the Gadarene man was sent home to tell everyone (5:19). In the same region Jesus now orders silence, and the order goes to the whole group, “them”, not only to the healed man. The reverse is not explained.

“Beyond measure” is hyperperissōs, a word found nowhere else in the New Testament. “He hath done all things well” has reminded many readers of Genesis 1:31, where God saw everything he had made and it was very good. The crowd speaks better than it knows.