The Hard Sayings: Matthew 5:30 - Part 3

And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

This verse uses much of the same vocabulary in the previous verse of Matthew 5:29. These three “hard” verses are all part of Jesus’s “filling up” the law on adultery during the Sermon on the Mount.

Here is a Biblical translation of Matthew 5:30:

NIV: And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

This verse, like the previous one, isn’t nearly as cruel as it sounds in translation to modern ears. To his audience, these three verses were all clearly humorous. They all use exaggeration, a humorous vocabulary, and promote ideas that only make sense as comic metaphors.

Jesus’s listeners likely connected this verse to the only Old Testament verse describing cutting off a hand as punishment. I researched this because I know that other religions cut off the hands of thieves, and I wondered if Judaism did as well. It didn’t. Instead, the one verse that describes cutting off a hand has a coarsely humorous side that also references the interactions between men and women,

This verse is from Moses, Deuteronomy 25:12.

ESV: "then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity."

This verse doesn’t sound humorous, but it references both the hand discussed in this verse and the eye of the previous verse in Matthew. In the Septuagint Greek version, it also uses the same Greek verb for "cut off" that Matthew does. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

What is coarsely funny here? The crime involved. The prior verse, Deuteronomy 25:11, describes a woman who defends her husband when he is fighting with another man. Her crime is how she does this: by grabbing her husband’s opponent's balls. Defending her husband was apparently the only context in which Moses could imagine a woman grabbing a man’s balls to cause him pain or, at least, the only one Moses condemns.

This was such a surprising law from Moses that I mentioned it to my wife, who didn’t know what Jesus verse I was writing about. She immediately asked, “Is grabbing another man’s balls a metaphor for adultery?” I told her that this was the topic Jesus was discussing. If my wife’s mind went there without knowing the context, some of the Judeans of Jesus’s time must have recognized the punishment and immediately connected it to the verse from Moses. Perhaps, this verse was considered a metaphor for adultery.

Comic Repetition

This verse repeats both the form and much of the vocabulary of the previous verse. Jesus, like all humorists, used repetition as a basis for much of his humor (see this article). Repetition allows the speaker to again undermine his listeners’ expectations by saying similar things with surprising twists. Jesus does that here, repeating most of the keywords in the previous verse. However, he also makes changes. The repeated words need to be explained a little. They are covered in more detail in the previous article, which is available to all.

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