The Hard Sayings: Matthew 5:29 -- Part Two

If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

This article is part of a series explaining the sayings of Jesus that are hard to understand. To see a list of these verses, go to this page.

In the previous article, we looked at the first part of this saying, Matthew 5:28 where Jesus equates gazing and coveting a woman with adultery. This week we go on to its partner, Matthew 5:29, which suggest a nonsensical remedy for gazing at women, plucking out one eye. These verses are part of Jesus’s “filling up” the law during the Sermon on the Mount.

Verses like this aren’t nearly as harsh and judgmental as they sound in translation to modern ears. To his audience then, they were clearly humorous. First, plucking out one eye is ineffective in terms of stopping us gazing at women. The other eye remains and, in the Greek word that Jesus chose, we would expect it to be the most troublesome of the two. But the biggest stumbling block to hearing this verse a serious was the vocabulary Jesus used. In Matthew 5:29, almost every other word is light-hearted.

However, another stumbling block is how we have been taught to think about Jesus. Some of us don’t want to think that Jesus was light-hearted and spoke in humorous ways about morality or anything else. So, even when his words are silly, we don’t want to hear them that way. Some of us have too a narrow view of holiness and divinity. The translators may be among them.

The Bible’s English

NIV: If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

Even without the words that Jesus chose, this verse comes across as a humorous exaggeration. Gouging out an eye is clearly an extreme reaction to gazing at a woman. Like many of Jesus’s verses, it is phrased to be acted out in gestures. Imagining it acted out makes it even harder to hear it as serious, the stumble, the gouging, and the tossing. Even the final word, translated as “hell” invites a gesture if properly translated.

The Setup Vocabulary

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The Greek word translated as “right” means "fortunate," "skillful," and "kindly." It is not the “left”, which has some positive qualities, but is generally thought of more negatively. The word “left” is “sinister,” and in Greek word has the sense of a bad omen. Interestingly, “right” is used hereas a noun. As a noun, this “right” means the "right hand.” Initially, his listeners heard both the eye and the right hand equated with each other. This becomes important at the end of the verse, before the punchline.

The Greek verb “stumble” means "to cause to stumble" or "to trip up." Our word "scandalize" comes from the Greek. It is one of Jesus’s favorite light-hearted words. In English, we would simply say, "if your good eye trips you up." See this article for more about the Jesus’s humorous use of “trips”. The combination of plucking out an eye and stumbling, seems like a reference to Leviticus 19:14, "Thou shalt not … put a stumbling block before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the LORD." The Greek noun form of “trips up,” means “stumbling block,” and is used in the Septuagint version of this verse.

The Greek verb translated as "pluck" means literally to "choose out of," as we say "pick out." In referring to the "eye," it means both taking out the eye for yourself and choosing the best for yourself. The word is humorous in the way it can be applied to a large range of situations such as choosing which eye and plucking it out.

The Greek verb translated as “throw” is another of Jesus’s favorite humorous words. There is an article about its humorous use here. It has the light-hearted feel of our English word, “toss.” It appears most commonly in “tossing out demons” but it is also used as it is here, referring to tossing things into the fire, which is the topic of another article, which lists all its uses.

Another part of the joke here is hidden in the verb translated as "it is profitable" and "it is better." The verb primarily means "brings together.” Its secondary meaning is "confer a benefit." It works in the same sense as our phrase "getting it all together" means getting better. So, by plucking out an eye, you are keeping yourself together.

The Punchline Vocabulary

The word translated as "lose" means both "to lose" and “to destroy. Jesus often uses it to mean "to destroy" in the form used here, where object destroyed acts on itself, so "destroy itself." Here, the sense is that the eye either loses or destroys itself.

The word translated as "part" primarily means "limb." In the KJV, it is translated as “member,” which is closer to its real meaning than the more generic “part.” While it doesn’t make much sense to describe an “eye” as a limb, making sense is not Jesus purpose here. The word “limb” it works because the “eye” was earlier equated to a right hand. However, coupled with the one, it suggests a double entendre for another part of the body that is more like a limb. See this article for more.

The word translated as "hell" is actually the place name of the trash dump outside of Jerusalem. This word also has its own article.  We don’t know if bodies that were burnt there, but if they were, it would have been the bodies of the diseased since the common Judaic practice was internment.

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Listeners Heard: If, however, that eye of yours, the right-handed one, trips you up, lift it out and toss away it from you! Because it brings you together when it destroys itself, one of those members of yours, as that whole body shouldn't be tossed into a trash dump.

I imagine Jesus holding his nose as the “trash dump.” My impression with trash dumps, even if they are not burning, is the smell.