Confusing Sayings: Matthew 12:43
When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.
This article is part of a series explaining Jesus’s Confusing Sayings. Many of these sayings do not look confusing in English translation, but that is because much of what Jesus originally said is simplified or obscured in English.
Know a confusing verse? Write me in a comment so I can analyze its Greek in a future article.
The context for this verse is that Jesus cures a blind and mute man, and the Pharisees claimed that he was able to do this by the power of Beelzebul. This leads to a long defense by Jesus, which covers many topics, and eventually turns the attack back onto the Pharisees. However, at the end of this, Jesus returns to a discussion of what happens to the “impure spirit” that is cast out. This verse, Matthew 12:43 (word-by word-analysis here), begins that explanation.
Seen objectively, this verse almost describes a scientific view of “spirits” more than an otherworldly one. He teaches about a physical phenomena that his listeners cannot understand because it is invisible to them. The Greek word for “know” is “to have been seen.” Invisible causes cannot be seen so, to the Greek speakers of the time, they could not be known. Jesus therefore uses the terms of his era, “spirit,” that is, a non-physical being, to describe the hidden nature of the causes involved. In a sense, “spirit” describes the information content of a being that allows its behavior.
NIV: When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.
The words in boldface are explained in this article.
This verse is a dramatic change from the previous topic, which was a condemnation of a certain “type” of person like the Pharisees. This is a good example of the kind of sudden topic shift that is strong evidence that Jesus was responding to questions people were asking him, even though those questions were not recorded in the Biblical narrative. Given Jesus’s response here, it seems likely the question might have wondered why people fall sick again, even after a “demon” is “cast out.” Jesus puts his answer in terms that his listeners could understand. Of course, in our modern times, some point to this as evidence of Jesus’s ignorance, but much of what he said can be understood even more clearly today because of our learning if we do not get “tripped up” by the language of his era.
Impure Spirits
This verse starts with an edited-out conjunction, “however,” that makes it seem a response to an unrecorded question (see Unrecorded Dialogue). This makes particular sense here because this verse returns the reader to where this series of verses began, with "casting out a demon."
At the time, the “comes out” would have been heard as the spirit leaving someone’s body. The affliction, affecting speech and hearing, could have been physical or mental, but its cure would have been seen as the spirit that caused the affliction leaving the body. This spirit is separate , independent from the person and their body. Think of this “spirit” as information, information in the DNA of the germs or bad information in the afflicted boy’s mind, causing him to think he could not hear or speak.
Today, we have a wealth of words to refer to invisible and "non-material" beings that affect physical health that exist independently of the individual. We call these invisible physical causes “germs” and “viruses.” In Jesus's time, these concepts were described as "demons" or, in this verse, “impure spirits.”
Jesus also cured mental problems that today we might call “psychoses. There is a strong indication in Jesus’s verses that these mental maladies may also have an unseen physical cause,” and we are learning today about the physical disorders that underlie many mental disorders. We call alcohol “spirits” because it affects our mind. An alcoholic might be described as "possessed by spirits," capturing the ancient idea. This verse itself can be read as describing the “spirit” as an alcoholic wandering around seeking a drink.
The Arid Places
The “dry places” seem to be the equivalent of a spirit’s “hell.” The word “dry” is from an adjective that means “waterless.” In the world of the living, this might describe a desert or wilderness (or a place without alcohol). For the wandering spirit, it describes a region without living bodies, which are 60% water, that it can infect. Once again, we must remember that people of Jesus’s time, understood this impure spirit to be the invisible cause of disease. They saw that such spirits duplicated and spread so they have a “life” of their own. The same is true both for germs and the causes for many mental disorders today. Both are cause by “bad seeds,” that is, bad information, either in the “germs” or in the thinking of people.
There is a hidden connection between the "unclean" and these "dry" places. This connection makes it a little clearer that Jesus is describing a temporarily “dead” spirit. The word "unclean" means ritually impure. When applied to a corpse, the "dry" means not being cleaned for burial, so that it was ritually unclean. A spirit outside of a body in a dry place is, in a sense, dead. It cannot interact with our physical world. The same is true for viruses, bacteria with no bodies to infect or bad memes with no mind to influence and pass it on.
Seeking Rest
The Greek verb translated as "seek" has a variety of meanings related to "searching" and "desiring." "Rest" is a Greek noun that means "rest," "repose," "relaxation," and "recreation." It is a compound word meaning a "pause between," what we describe as a "work break.” This implies that this wandering through the waterless places is work, rather than enjoyment for the homeless cause of diseases. This seeking, searching for a host, is the “work” performed by these non-material beings, germs, and memes. While infecting a body is recreation.
Followers Heard
What did Jesus’s listeners hear when Jesus said this?
Listeners Heard: However, when that unclean spirit exits out from this man, it passes through dry places, seeking rest and doesn't really discover it.
Jesus is explaining where these disease causing invisible beings come from. They can be transmitted from body to body, but they are also wandering outside of people’s bodies, in the environment. This is different than what many people of Jesus’s time thought, which was that these spirits were sent by the Divine as punishment.
Today, we don’t see the “impure spirit” as a single being, but as a multitude of microscopically visible agents that do not leave the body together as a single unit. This idea of a “daemon” being a multitude is implied elsewhere in the Bible when the spirit infecting the mad man in the graveyard names himself “multitude.”