The Heart, the Table, and the Unexpected Guest

This is the first delegation from Jerusalem in Matthew, the capital sending experts a long way north to question a Galilean teacher. The walk was well over a hundred kilometres. The dispute has moved up from local Pharisees to the centre.

“The tradition of the elders” was the body of oral teaching that grew up around the written law, later gathered into the Mishnah around AD 200. It includes a whole tractate called Yadayim, “Hands”. The washing was a matter of ritual purity, not hygiene. “Eat bread” is a Hebrew way of saying have a meal.

Jesus hands their question straight back in the same shape: they asked “Why do thy disciples transgress”, he asks “Why do ye also transgress”. Their charge was against tradition; his is against the commandment of God.

The first quotation is the fifth commandment (Exodus 20:12), the second Exodus 21:17. In Hebrew, “honour” is kabed, literally to treat as heavy or weighty, and “curse” is qalal, to treat as light. The two commands are opposites in a single image of weight.

Mark gives the Hebrew term, Corban, an offering dedicated to God (Mark 7:11). A first century ossuary lid found near Jerusalem carries an inscription declaring whatever might profit a person from it to be korban to God. Declaring property “a gift” put it out of the parents’ reach.

The King James prints “he shall be free” in italics, words added to finish a sentence that breaks off in the Greek. “Of none effect” is a legal verb for annulling a contract, the word Paul uses for a covenant being “disannulled” (Galatians 3:17).

“Well” means aptly, to the point. Isaiah 29, which Jesus is about to quote, is addressed to Jerusalem, the city Isaiah calls Ariel, and the questioners have just come from Jerusalem. The old oracle is aimed at the same address.

The quotation is Isaiah 29:13. A few verses earlier in that chapter the prophet describes a sealed book which the learned man cannot read (Isaiah 29:11–12). The lips and the heart are set against each other, the whole charge in a single line.

In Isaiah’s Hebrew the second half of the line is “their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men”. The Greek “in vain” probably comes from reading one Hebrew word slightly differently. Matthew follows the Greek, which sharpens the point: worship built on human rules goes nowhere.

Jesus turns from the experts to the crowd and calls them over. “Hear, and understand” are the two verbs that ran through the parables chapter (13:13–15). The next saying is meant for everyone, not reserved for scholars.

Mark adds his own comment on this saying, “purging all meats” (Mark 7:19), taken to mean that Jesus declared all foods clean. Matthew does not include it. Years later Peter could still say, “I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean” (Acts 10:14).

Only Matthew records this exchange and the two sayings that follow. The disciples are worried about how the remark landed with men of influence. “Offended” is the stumbling verb once more, now used of the Pharisees tripping over a saying.

Israel was called the LORD’s planting (Isaiah 60:21; 61:3), and the Qumran community called itself an “eternal planting”. “Rooted up” is the verb the servants wanted to use on the tares in 13:29. Here the uprooting is left to the Father.

Paul later describes a Jewish teacher as “confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind” (Romans 2:19). The “ditch” is a pit, the same word as the pit the sheep falls into on the Sabbath in 12:11. “Let them alone” means leave them be, do not chase their approval.

Mark says “his disciples asked him” (Mark 7:17); Matthew names Peter as the one who speaks. “Declare” is the verb used in 13:36 for explaining the tares. A single saying about the mouth is called a “parable”, the Hebrew mashal, which covered any riddle or pointed saying.

“Yet” translates a rare Greek word meaning “even now”, found only here in the New Testament. After two chapters of teaching and two miraculous meals the disciples still need the plainest things spelled out. “Also” puts them beside the Pharisees.

The “draught” was a privy or cesspit. When Jehu destroyed the temple of Baal in Samaria, the Book of Kings says he “made it a draught house unto this day” (2 Kings 10:27). The illustration is deliberately earthy: food goes in, is digested and leaves.

The mouth is the same doorway in both directions, but what comes out of it has a different source. Jesus has said this before, when charged with casting out devils by Beelzebub: “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (12:34).

After “evil thoughts”, the list follows the second half of the Ten Commandments: murder, adultery, theft, false witness, the sixth to the ninth, with fornications added beside adultery. Mark’s list runs to thirteen items (Mark 7:21–22); Matthew gives seven.

The last clause answers the question the delegation actually asked, about handwashing, and goes no further. Matthew’s closing words keep the ruling on the ground of the dispute rather than drawing Mark’s wider conclusion about foods. “Unwashen” appears only here and in Mark 7:2.

The two cities Jesus named in 11:21–22 as places that would have repented now become his destination. Elijah too had gone to Zarephath, “which belongeth to Zidon”, and helped a Gentile widow there (1 Kings 17:9). “Departed” is Matthew’s verb of withdrawal once again.

Mark calls her “a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation” (Mark 7:26). Matthew uses an old Old Testament name, “Canaan”, the name of the peoples Israel displaced, long out of everyday use by his time. She “came out” of her territory toward him, crossing the line from her side.

It is the only time in the Gospels that Jesus meets a plea for help with silence. “Send her away” can also mean “grant her request and let her go”, so the disciples may be asking him to give her what she wants to be rid of her noise.

The answer is spoken to the disciples, not to her; she may not even be meant to hear it. “I am not sent” uses the passive in which God is the unnamed sender. The same words set limits on the twelve’s mission in 10:6.

“Lord, help me” is three words in the Greek, as short as Peter’s “Lord, save me” on the water (14:30). Psalm 109:26 prays, “Help me, O LORD my God.” She has moved from shouting behind them to kneeling in front of him.

“Dogs” here is a diminutive, “little dogs”, the household kind that lived under the table, not the street scavengers of 7:6. Commentators disagree on how much the small word softens the insult. Jews sometimes spoke of Gentiles as dogs. “Meet” means fitting or proper.

“Truth, Lord” is a plain “yes, Lord”. She agrees and then uses his own picture: the dogs have “masters”, and the Greek word for masters is kyrioi, the same word she has been calling Jesus. In well off homes bread used to wipe the fingers was dropped to the dogs.

“Great is thy faith”, one chapter after Peter was told “O thou of little faith” (14:31) on the water. “O woman” is emphatic and personal. “Be it unto thee even as thou wilt” gives her the thing she asked, framed in her own will.

Mark says Jesus returned “through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis” (Mark 7:31), so the route skirted Gentile country. Matthew sets him on a mountain, seated, the posture of 5:1. The hillside becomes a place of healing rather than teaching.

“Maimed” is a word for a crippled or deformed limb, different from “lame”. “Cast them down” is a verb of throwing, suggesting the haste of the crowd laying the sick at his feet. The healing is summed up in four words: “and he healed them”.

The crowd’s list reverses the order of the previous verse and adds the result to each condition. “The God of Israel” is the language of Psalm 72:18: “Blessed be the LORD God, the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous things.”

At the first feeding the disciples raised the problem (14:15); here Jesus raises it himself. Three days means whatever food people had brought is gone. “Faint” means to give out, collapse on the road home, a practical fear for people who had walked far.

“Whence should we have so much bread in the wilderness” echoes Moses complaining to the LORD, “Whence should I have flesh to give unto all this people?” (Numbers 11:13). The question sounds as though the first feeding had not happened.

“Little fishes” is a diminutive, small fish. The question “How many loaves have ye?” makes the disciples count what they have rather than what they lack. Seven loaves this time, two more than before, for a smaller crowd.

The first crowd sat “on the grass” (14:19); this one sits “on the ground”. That may reflect a later season, when the spring grass had dried, or a different kind of hillside; Matthew does not explain. The command to sit comes before any food is visible.

“Gave thanks” is eucharisteo, the verb from which the word Eucharist comes, where 14:19 had “blessed”. Jesus uses it over the cup at the Last Supper (26:27). The pattern is the same: take, give thanks, break, give to disciples, disciples to the crowd.

These “baskets” are a different word from those in 14:20: spyris, a large hamper. Paul was let down over the wall of Damascus in one (Acts 9:25), so they could hold a grown man. Seven of them were filled.

Jesus later makes the disciples recall both meals, with their numbers, loaves and baskets, in 16:9–10. The count again leaves women and children uncounted, so the whole crowd was larger than the figure given.

Many manuscripts read “Magadan”, a place otherwise unknown; Mark has “Dalmanutha” (Mark 8:10). Magdala, on the western shore, was a fish-salting town, the home of Mary Magdalene, and excavations there in 2009 uncovered a first century synagogue.