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The Sermon on the Mount, Part II: Matthew 5:13-37

The Sermon on the Mount, Part II: Matthew 5:13-37

Last updated on: October 22, 2026 at 3:48 am by Gabriel Blanchard

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The Sermon on the Mount, Part II: Matthew 5:13-37 2026-10-22T03:48:28-04:00 Gabriel Blanchard

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The Sermon on the Mount, Part II (Matt. 5:13-37)

The Sermon on the Mount continues; where the Beatitudes laid out an idea of how spiritual growth may be expected to progress through eight stages, we now transition to direct moral instruction. This fits into a preëxisting genre of contemporary Judaic literature: midrash*, more specifically מִדְרָשׁ הֲלָכָה [midh’råsh halåkhåh] or “exposition of the way” in English. (There was another type of* midrash*, but it does not concern us at the moment.) This consisted in taking the rules of interpretation preserved in the Oral* Torah and using them to understand and apply the six hundred and thirteen mitzvot (מִצְוֺת [mitz’woth]), the explicit commandments of the Written Torah*.*

It was in midrash that one rabbinic beyt*, or interpretive school, might vary from another* beyt*. Two such schools were prominent in Yeshua’s day, Beyt Hillel and Beyt Shammai;1 they differed over both ritual and moral interpretations of the Law. An example of their ritual disagreement is the question of how to light the chanukiyah (the eight-pronged Chanukah lamp) night by night. Beyt Hillel said one lamp should be lit the first night of the holiday, two the second, and so on, their reasoning being that this increase of light was symbolically fitting, because one always seeks to increase in holiness. By contrast, Beyt Shammai said that all eight should be light the first night of Chanukah, seven the second, and so on, on the grounds that the miraculous supply of ritually-acceptable oil for the Menorah ran out once the naturally-procured oil was ready.*2 In the moral sphere, they disagreed sharply over divorce. Beyt Hillel permitted a husband to divorce his wife on any grounds at all (though—either from the very beginning, or by the indirect influence of their opponents—there did have to be some grounds put down as part of the legal formula of the גֵּט [gêṭ], or bill of divorce). However, basing its position on the conjoined interpretation of texts such as Deuteronomy 22:13-19, 22:28-29, and 24:1-4, Beyt Shammai adopted the far more rigorous view that the only legitimate cause for divorce was sexual immorality.3 In this part of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord offers midrash on four mitzvot, thus beginning to establish what I have more or less nicknamed “Beyt Yeshua”—the form his community of disciples took during his ministry proper, before his Passion and Resurrection initiated the process by which Christianity would become a separate religion from Judaism.

Matthew 5:13-37, RSV-CE

Folio with the first words of Matthew
from the Book of Lindisfarne.

“You are the salt of the earth;a but if salt has lost its taste,b how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

“Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them.c For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot,d will pass from the law until all is accomplished.e Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

“You have heard that it was said to the men of old,f ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to youf that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the hell of fire.g So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift thereh before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Make friends quickly with your accuser, while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison;i truly, I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny.

“You have heard that it was said,f ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to youf that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin,j pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to youf that every one who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity,k makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

“Again you have heard that it was said to the men of old,f ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I say to you,f Do not swear at all,l either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.”

Matthew 5:13-37, my translation

“You are the salt of the earth;a yet if salt is dulled,b what will you salt it with? It has power for nothing, except to be thrown outside and walked on by people.

“You are the light of the world. A city lying up upon mountains cannot be hidden; nor do they ignite a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lamp-stand, and it shines for everyone in the household. Thus your light must shine before people, so that they may behold your fair works and glorify your Father in the heavens.

Sermon of the Beatitudes (c. 1890),
by James Tissot.

“Do not suppose that I came to undo the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to undo [them] but to fulfill:c for ‘amin, I tell you, until heaven and the earth pass away—not one letter, not one serif,d will pass away from the Law, until everything has come about.e So if anyone should loosen one of the least of these charges, and teach people thus, he will be called least in the kingship of the heavens; but whoever does and teaches [them], he will be called great in the kingship of the heavens. For I tell you that unless your justice overflows more than the scribes and Pryshaya, you will not come into the kingship of the heavens.

“You have heard that the message to them of old was:f You will not murder; if someone murders, he will be liable to judgment. I tell youf that everyone who is outraged with his brother will be liable to judgment—if someone says to his brother, ‘Reyka’,’ he will be liable to the Session; if someone says, ‘Stupid,’ he will be liable to fiery Gehinnom.g So if you are bringing your gift to the altar and remember there that your brother has anything against you, quit your gift thereh in front of the altar and first go and be reconciled with your brother, and then come offer your gift. Be agreed with your adversary quickly, while you are as yet on the way, lest your adversary hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the attendant, and you be thrown into a guardhouse;i ‘amin, I tell you, you will not come out of there until you have repaid the last farthing.

“You have heard that the message to them of old was:f You will not commit adultery. I tell youf that everyone who looks at a woman to crave her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye trips you up,j pluck it out and throw it away from you, for it profits you that one of your parts be undone and not that your whole body be thrown into Gehinnom. And if your right hand trips you up, cut it off and throw it away from you, for it profits you that one of your parts be undone and not that your whole body go out into Gehinnom. And that the message was: Whoever undoes [his marriage to] his wife, he must give her a bill of separation. I tell youf that everyone who undoes his [marriage to his] wife, except on grounds of sexual immorality,k makes her into an adulteress, and whoever marries a separated woman commits adultery.

“Again, you have heard that the message to them of old was:f Do not forswear [yourself], but repay to the Lord what you have sworn. I tell you,f do not take oaths at all:l neither by heaven, because it is God’s throne; nor by the earth, because it is the footstool of his feet; nor by Yrushalem, because it is the city of the great King; nor take an oath by your head, because you cannot make one hair white or black. Your word ‘Yes’ must be ‘yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘no’; what overflows these is from evil.”

Textual Notes

a. the salt of the earth | τὸ ἅλας τῆς γῆς [to halas tēs gēs]: Remember what I said about ἁλιεῖς, which I translated “watermen”? I told you there’d be a pun.

Deposits of halite (“rock salt”) on the Judean
shore of the Dead Sea. Photo by Wilson44691,
used via a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source).

We don’t think about salt all that often, since, thanks to modern tech, pure salt is cheaply abundant for us and we have other methods of preserving food against spoilage. In antiquity, on the other hand, salt’s value was a rare cross-cultural universal, like the value of precious metals. Salting food was one of the relatively few ways to protect from rot; Leviticus 2 explicitly requires all grain offerings to be presented with salt, and Roman soldiers might receive a portion of their wages in salt (which gave rise to the term salary, descending from the Latin sal “salt”—a word that happened to be pretty similar in form to our own Anglo-Saxon term, ᛋᛠᛚᛏ [sealt]). Thanks to its preciousness and usefulness, salt acquired a number of very positive symbolic meanings: it could represent holiness, purity, loyalty, steadfastness, and the like, and in later esoteric traditions, many magical or alchemical processes called for the use of salt, often as an apotropaic.4 On the practical side, luckily for the Kingdom of Yehud, they were sitting right next to a great source of halite, or naturally-occurring “rock salt”: the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is an endorheic basin, i.e., a body of water which has no outflow, meaning that its only way of losing water is through evaporation, a process which leaves any salt the water may have contained behind. (In the US, two incredibly “no work was done on these names” lakes, the Salton Sea and the Great Salt Lake are exemplary endorheic basins.) The salinity of the water is so high that not only can you mine salt from the surrounding rocks, you can walk along the beach and just pick up clumps of rock salt from the shore. (I mean, “can” in the English teacher sense; I’m not recommending this. Someone would probably yell at you.)

b. but if salt has lost its taste/yet if salt is dulled | ἐὰν δὲ τὸ ἅλας μωρανθῇ [ean de to halas mōranthē]: However, halite’s got a downside: chemically pure salt—sodium chloride, NaCl—is practically never found completely by itself in nature. Its crystals are nearly always mixed with something else, usually with something else that forms similar crystals under similar conditions. Sometimes this results in substances that are perfectly edible, as when salt occurs with admixtures of gypsum; even then, though, you’re naturally hoping for it to be more salt than gypsum, or the salt won’t be very salty, either in flavor or in, eh, “effect by volume” I suppose. If you On the other hand, if you get a batch of salt with substantial impurities of magnesium sulfate, it might give you a boost to bathe in the stuff (this being what we call “Epsom salts”)—but ingesting even the tiniest quantity apparently has a fairly potent laxative effect, and it seems to be easy to reach the “magnesium poisoning” level where symptoms advance to the likes of diarrhea, vomiting, and low blood pressure, if not worse.

c. Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them/Do not suppose that I came to undo the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to undo [them] but to fulfill | Μὴ νομίσητε ὅτι ἦλθον καταλῦσαι τὸν νόμον ἢ τοὺς προφήτας· οὐκ ἦλθον καταλῦσαι ἀλλὰ πληρῶσαι [mē nomisēte hoti ēlthon katalüsai ton nomon ē tous profētas: ouk ēlthon katalüsai alla plērōsai]: This lines up with Matthew‘s general outlook. Yeshua is the Messiah and the new Moshe, which would certainly make radical changes possible in principle—but only on the assumption that being the Messiah and being the new Moshe actually meant something. The Lord Yeshua interprets and reinterprets the Torah on his own authority, without reference to previous rabbis, which is a dramatic break from mainstream midrash; yet at the same time, bothering to interpret the Torah at all only makes sense on the assumption of its validity. The First Gospel includes more and harsher criticisms of the Pryshaya than any of the others, yet is also the only one to preserve the statement, from the very lips of Yeshua, that they and the scribes “sit in Moshe’s seat, so observe and keep everything they tell you to”. If I’m correct that Matthew was written around the time of the Council of Yrushalem and the decision to admit Gentiles qua Gentiles to the Church (i.e., to admit them without גִּיּוּר [giyúr], or conversion to Judaism), then this evangelist is taking pains to make it clear that the admission of Gentiles is not a desertion of Judaism on the part of Jewish Christians, who fully intend to go on being Jews as well as Christians.

A Sephardic Torah scroll in a silver case,
currently open to the Shema (source).

d. not an iota, not a dot/not one letter, not one serif | ἰῶτα ἓν ἢ μία κεραία οὐ [iōta hen ē mia keraia ou]: Both the letter ἰῶτα in the Greek alphabet, ι, and the related letter yodh in the Aramaic script, י, are the smallest letters in their respective writing systems; a κεραία, literally a “horn,” was one of the strokes used to create a letter in the Aramaic script. The old-fashioned phrase “jot and tittle” derives from this passage: jot is the natural English descendant of iōta, hence its two meanings as a noun and a verb, “the tiniest amount of something” and “to hurriedly write some kind of note,” while tittle can technically refer to any diacritical mark, but is in particular the formal name for the dots used to complete the lower-case letters i and j.5

e. until all is accomplished/until everything has come about | ἕως ἂν πάντα γένηται [heōs an panta genētai]: This is a rather curious qualifying phrase. The verb is a form of γίνομαι [ginomai], meaning “to cause to be; to become, (by extension) happen”—not the sort of verb we usually associate with laws. To me, this suggests the interpretive principles (the new Oral Torah, if you will) given to the apostles in Luke 24, by which the Torah becomes of itself an allegorical prophecy of Christ. On this interpretation, the meaning of Christ’s words here is that the Torah will not be abrogated until someone has fulfilled it, which would presumably mean perfect obedience to all the mitzvot. (It might have broader implications than this specifically moral interpretation, or rather, I’d strongly expect it to; but it would, in any case, not mean less than “perfect obedience.”) However, I’m by no means certain that the original audience of Matthew—which, both on my view and in the opinions of most New Testament scholars, was written before Luke—would have been working explicitly with a framework of that kind, and besides, Yeshua’s own audience at the time the Sermon on the Mount was given would obviously not have had that context. So while this might be one of the Lord’s cryptic “for best results, disciples should wait four to six years to understand this” remarks, it could also mean something else.

f. You have heard that it was said to the men of old … But I say to you/You have heard that the message to them of old was … I tell you | Ἠκούσατε ὅτι ἐρρέθη τοῖς ἀρχαίοις· … ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν [ēkousate hoti errethē tois archaiois: … egō de legō hümin]: The comments on these first four mitzvot (two additional mitzvot will be discussed in next week’s post) establish the general pattern of Christ’s midrash, at least as represented in Matthew. That pattern is well illustrated by a minor technical point about Greek grammar here, so bear with me.

Folio 2 from Lectionary 183, dating to
the 10th century.

If you look at the snippet of Greek text that I provided for reference, you’ll notice that the second Greek word of the second clause, the one following the ellipsis, is δὲ. This is what grammarians call a discursive particle: it’s one of those words you say while talking not so much because you want its meaning (though many discursive particles do have a definable meaning), but just because it sort of smooths out the talking process itself. I’m not a neuroscientist, but the cartoon explanation I’ve heard that feels right is that your mouth can move a little faster talking than your brain can planning what to say, so discursives essentially buy your brain a little extra time without running the risk of sounding like you’ve just quit talking. English discursive particles include both sub-verbal noises, like uh, and fully-fledged words assigned to discursive work, such as so, now, well, you know, and like.

In this specific part of Matthew, δὲ is frequently rendered “but,” since insofar as it has any semantic meaning attached to it, that meaning sort of waves its hand in the general direction of “[in light contrast with what I just said].” The RSV exemplifies this interpretive decision. I went for a different but, I hope, equally correct choice, which nearly every translator of Greek into English has to use sooner or later: not translating δὲ at all, because its contrastive-ness can be that light. (For a half-parallel example, take the English like when used for flow. It can indicate, especially in narratives of grievances, that the speaker is about to do an impression of something said to them or in their presence by a third party; this combines the word’s discursive use with one of the “official,” semantic functions of the word. Still, it’s equally possible, even for the same speaker, to deploy like in another sentence merely as a particle, with no impression imminent and no other semantic meaning taking its place.)

This (I hope!) sheds light on Yeshua’s pattern. In all six of the mitzvot he addresses in Matthew 5:27-48, he begins by offering the original wording of the commandment, occasionally accompanied by some brief comment on it. He then details his interpretation, which diverges in each case from the mainstream. His midrash does not always diverge from the mainstream in the same way or to the same degree, with one exception: in every case, the mitzvah becomes harder to really keep. He has just said that he has not come to abolish the Law; I think the simpler contrast of “You have heard … I tell you,” without the added force of “But I tell you,” conveys the tone here better.

g. the hell of fire/fiery Gehinnom | τὴν γέενναν τοῦ πυρός [tēn Geennan tou püros]: Γέεννα was the Greek transcription of the Hebrew name גֵּיהִנּוֹם [Gêyhinnoum], meaning “Hinnom Valley”—Hinnom was apparently a figure from Canaanite legend. The name referred to a gorge or wadi to the south of Yrushalem with a colorful past. If you don’t know about this one already, be aware, they weren’t nice colors.

Visions of the Hereafter—Hell (c. 1500),
by Hieronymus Bosch.

Though academia was skeptical of this for some time in the latter half of the twentieth century, it now seems to be fairly well-established, from archæological evidence as well as written sources, that one of the familiar religious practices of Canaanite and Phoenician culture was to sacrifice human infants to the gods. (The deity most associated with these offerings is probably Melqart, a god whose name roughly means “the King of Town,” and who was brought along as the patron deity of Carthage when Phoenician colonists established it.) Not only in and around the Holy Land, but in the excavated ruins of Carthage, evidence has been found of this gruesome practice, which was utterly forbidden by the Torah. Nevertheless, those kings of both Israel and Judah who decided to … diversify their religious portfolios, shall we say, might chose to do so at least in part by sacrificing a baby. In Judah, when this was done at all, it was apparently done at a location in the Hinnom Valley called תֹּפֶת [tofeth] (it’s not entirely clear whether this was a name for this site, a name for this kind of site, etc.) The prophet Yiremyah touches upon the use of Tofeth (or “the tofeth,” whichever it was) shortly before the fall of the kingdom to the Babylonians:

“Because they have forsaken me, and have estranged this place, and have burned incense in it unto other gods, whom neither they nor their fathers have known, … and have filled this place with the blood of innocents; they have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind: therefore, behold, the days come,” saith the LORD, “that this place shall no more be called Tophet, nor ‘The valley of the son of Hinnom,’ but ‘The valley of slaughter.’ … I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies, and by the hands of them that seek their lives: and their carcasses will I give to be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth. … And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege … and they shall bury them in Topheth, till there be no place to bury.”
—Jeremiah 19:4-11

The Hinnom Valley thus became an archetypal example of a location under God’s curse. By late in the Second Temple period, although it was not a universal belief, the doctrine of hell had taken shape as a theological opinion held by some (small-o) orthodox Jews, leaving traces in texts like Isaiah 66:24 and Judith 16:17; Gehinnom was evidently chosen as a stock image of hell. (I’ve come across the assertion that the Hinnom Valley was used as a garbage dump in the time of Christ, and that the “fires of Gehinnom” were literal fires burning the trash. This seems perfectly credible, but I wasn’t able to find much in the way of verification.)

Part of a fresco depicting hell in the Church
of St. Nicholas in Raduil, Bulgaria. Photo by
Edal Anton Lefterov, used via a CC BY-SA
3.0 license (source).

Since the destruction of the Temple, Judaism has gone in a rather different direction than Christianity on this topic. Only a selection of the very worst sinners are held to be sent to anything resembling the Christian idea of hell—of which, remember, one of the salient features (in most versions of the doctrine) is its permanence. Temporary punishment after death, if followed by cleansing from sin and transition to some more or less positive eternal state, is usually classified as a form of the doctrine of Purgatory; and it seems to be this, more than or instead of hell, that Gehinnom normally represents in Judaism today, when the topic is broached at all. I gather that the normal view in Judaism is that, aside from a small handful (both Jewish and Gentile) who sink to permanent damnation as the history-making rank of evildoers, no one spends longer than a year in Gehinnom. This is why bereaved Jews recite the mourner’s kaddish6 only for the eleven months following someone’s death. However, all this applies to modern Judaism: the precise view, or range of possible views, taken by Pryshaya in the Lord’s lifetime seem to have been more nebulous.

h. So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there/So if you are bringing your gift to the altar and remember there that your brother has anything against you, quit your gift there | ἐὰν οὖν προσφέρῃς τὸ δῶρόν σου ἐπὶ τὸ θυσιαστήριον κἀκεῖ μνησθῇς ὅτι ὁ ἀδελφός σου ἔχει τι κατὰ σοῦ, ἄφες ἐκεῖ τὸ δῶρόν σου [ean oun prosferēs to dōron sou epi to thüsiastērion kakei mnēsthēs hoti ho adelfos sou echei ti kata sou, afes ekei to dōron sou]: This is a rather striking instruction. This is not because of the high priority it places on attending to moral duties, at the expense of ritual ones if necessary (even within the precincts of the Temple); that is a very ancient element of the Hebrew Bible itself: “Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams” (I Samuel 15:22). What’s striking about it is, so to speak, the direction of the anger under discussion. Read the paragraph again: the rest of it is warning us against being angry, apparently even when we do have a good reason for it; but here, the Lord instructs us “if you are bringing your gift to the altar and remember there that your brother has anything against you“—which seems to be advising listeners to be as wary of causing anger in others as of indulging anger of their own.

i. prison/a guardhouse | φυλακὴν [fülakēn]: Some readers or listeners take this to be a warning against being sent to hell over unjust or unrestrained anger, and assume that the allusion to “not getting out until you have repaid the last farthing” is a mildly euphemistic way of saying that you’ll never get out. Others—my understanding is that Origen is the first person explicitly known to have taken this view—interpret this as a reference to Purgatory, and take the warning a little more literally: that you will, eventually, get out, but it’ll take far longer and be much more of a pain in the neck than it would have been to just make nice with your brother in the first place.

j. If your right eye causes you to sin/If your right eye trips you up | εἰ δὲ ὁ ὀφθαλμός σου ὁ δεξιὸς σκανδαλίζει σε [ei de ho ofthalmos sou ho dexios skandalizei se]: This is often cited as an example of the Near Eastern rhetorical device of hyperbole; in other words, the Lord isn’t actually telling people to give themselves oculectomies! This is, no doubt, correct.

Illuminated capital (c. 1450) by Stefan
Lochner, depicting souls in Purgatory.

However, I think we can fruitfully contemplate the results of taking the expression more literally. After all, if your eye caused you to sin, then objectively it would be better to pluck it out and enter heaven mutilated than to keep both eyes and take them to hell with you. Of course, plucking an eye out doesn’t guarantee you entry to heaven. There are lots of sins that don’t involve the eyes at all. But even apart from that, think about it for a moment. Even when we’re talking about the specific sin of lust, it isn’t really your eye that’s “causing” you to sin, is it now? It only looked where you chose to look; which, I suspect, is part of the point of this choice of framing and phrasing.

k. on the ground of unchastity/on grounds of sexual immorality | λόγου πορνείας [logou porneias]: Although this is often taken by modern readers to be alluding to adultery, this is probably not what the text is talking about: there was a specific word for adultery in Koiné Greek, μοιχεία [moicheia], the verb form of which (μοιχεύω [moicheuō]) appears in these very verses, and which is not the term used here—πορνεία means something different, and would not normally cover acts of μοιχεία, although it technically could. Πορνεία, rendered very literally, means “whoring”; it was used rather generally for sexual misconduct other than adultery (so, premarital sex, incest, prostitution, promiscuity, etc.) The conventional Catholic interpretation is that this is a reference to incest—the gist presumably being that if a couple discovers after marrying that they are related within too close a degree for the marriage to be permitted, then dissolving the marriage is the correct course of action. (I specify “after marrying” on the assumption that, if this were discovered before the marriage, that marriage would not be allowed to proceed in the first place.) However, this is only an interpretation of the text; it will sustain other interpretations. Curiously, this is a rare example of Beyt Yeshua agreeing with the rigorist Beyt Shammai: in most cases, he sides with the lenient Beyt Hillel.

l. do not swear at all/do not take oaths at all | μὴ ὀμόσαι ὅλως [mē homosai holōs]: This is quite an unusual ethical point. Most Christian traditions argue that this should not be taken literally—that the Lord is making a point about the value of honesty and is using hyperbole to do it. That said, a few groups have taken this quite straightforwardly. In the High and Late Middle Ages, inquisitors often identified Waldenses7 by their resistance to swearing oaths, which (then as now, but without modern concessions to conscience about this matter) was a standard element in both ecclesiastical and secular courts.

The entrance to a Waldensian church (hence
Chiesa Valdese) in Rome. Photo by Binomio77,
used via a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source).

Footnotes

1These were named for their founders, Hillel the Elder and Shammai the Elder, leaders of the Pryshaya shortly before the time of Christ—it is possible that he could have met Shammai the Elder (who died around 30 CE), and might while still a child even have met Hillel the Elder (who died some time close to the year 10). The term which I’ve transcribed as beyt, בֵּית [bêyth], is also and more commonly represented as beth, beit, or occasionally bet; its base meaning is “house,” but it could also be used of schools (either in the concrete “schoolhouse” sense or the metaphorical “school of thought” sense), and was part of the phrase Beyt ha-Mikdash or “the Holy House,” a standard term for the Temple.
2This alludes to a miracle that came to be associated with the events of Chanukah, although it begins to be mentioned only a few centuries afterwards: it is absent from sources like I and II Maccabees and Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews. Reputedly, when the partisans of the Maccabee Revolt reclaimed Jerusalem from the Seleucids and began the procedure of cleansing the Temple (which had been defiled by Antiochus Epiphanies, who not only syncretized the Lord with Zeus but offered pigs on the altar), they discovered that there was only a single day’s supply of olive oil to light the Menorah, which is supposed to stay lit continually—and the method for producing oil acceptable for templar use took a week. Having no alternative, they put the oil they had into the Menorah, and it just … stayed lit for eight full days on that single day’s supply. This allowed the Jews enough time to produce a new batch of ritually pure oil, after which the miracle ceased and they resumed the standard practice for fueling the Menorah. (Whether historical or fabricated, the claimed miracle evokes that recounted in II Kings 4.)
3General information about Beyt Hillel and Beyt Shammai can be found here in the online edition of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia; the particular details about their stances on divorce and the origin of Beyt Shammai’s reasoning appears in that encyclopedia’s article on divorce.
4The Early Modern Swiss theologian Paracelsus carried this idea even further. The system of alchemy he developed based itself not so much on the four classical elements of fire, air, water, and earth, but on what he called the three primes, which were sulfur, mercury, and salt. (As far as I can tell, the three primes were a bit more like the Chinese wu xing—natural processes or forces, more than elements or “stuff.”)
5Other parts of letters also have formal names.
• Most English letters have a vertical stem, for example, like b, p, and r.
• Some have ascenders, like f, h, and k, or descenders, like g, p, and y—some now-obsolete letters or letter-forms had both, including ∫ (“long s“) and þ (“thorn”).
• Some possess a closed loop known as a bowl, including b, d, and q.
• Several have a crossbar, such as capital A, e, and capital H.
• The uppermost and lowermost angles in the upper-case forms of A, M, and N and in both forms of v and w are apices (sg. apex) for those that point up, and vertices (sg. vertex) for those that point down.
Note that letter-parts do not have to be consistent between the upper and lower cases of a letter; indeed, this is what differentiates the distinction of cases from a mere difference in size, even though several letters (e.g. c, o, s) differ in case only by being of different size. The letter a—uniquely, if I’m not mistaken—actually has no parts in common between its two case-forms. If you have the same sort of mental illness I do and aren’t satiated with this plethora of typographic minutiæ, I suggest beginning here.
6The kaddish is a doxology recited at the conclusion of services in the synagogue; an English translation of its text can be found here. It has certain variant forms adapted to circumstances, one of which is the “mourner’s kaddish,” recited by the bereaved for a time after their loved one’s death, the interval for doing so being at maximum eleven months, as stated above. The prayer’s name originates in the Hebrew קַדִּישׁ [qadysh], a derivative of the radical ק־ד־שׁ [q-d-sh] that provides words associated with the idea of sanctity; the handful of cities in the Bible called “Kadesh,” which get their name from the same radical, likely started out as shrines of some kind.
7The Waldenses or Waldensians (named for their founder, Peter Waldo) are honestly a fascinating group. They originated in the east and southeast of France and the extreme northwest of Italy, in the cluster of overlapping regions known as Aosta, Arelat, Burgundy, Savoy, and Valais. Like many sects that began during the High Middle Ages, they were one form of a broader movement in favor of apostolic poverty; an orthodox expression of the same impulse came into existence only a few years after them in the Minorites or “Little Brothers,” who in modern parlance are called the Franciscan Order. Founded in 1173, the Waldenses are hailed by some as forerunners of the Protestant Reformation, along with two theologically similar groups that came into existence later and possibly with Waldensian influence, namely the fourteenth-century English Lollards (disciples of Fr. John Wycliffe) and the fifteenth-century Hussites of Bohemia (founded by Fr. Jan Hus). There is some reason for this: many of the views these three groups shared—e.g., rejection of certain sacraments, iconoclasm, little to no hierarchical clergy—were derived from another view they shared which we might call “Biblicism,” a sort of proto-version of sola Scriptura. Wycliffe’s translation of the Vulgate into Middle English is well-known, but his Waldense predecessors did him one better: it was common among them to memorize entire books of the Bible (and I don’t mean this in the on-a-technicality way where someone might commit Jude or Philemon to memory—I mean stuff like Romans or Matthew or Acts). And finally, unlike almost any other religious movement dating to the twelfth century, the Waldenses still exist! There are a few tens of thousands of them, living principally in Italy with handfuls in other places, including Argentina, Germany, Paraguay, the United States, and Uruguay; since the sixteenth or seventeenth century, they have aligned themselves with the Reformed, a.k.a. Calvinist, branch of Protestant Christianity.

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October 16, 2026

The Sermon on the Mount, Part I: Matthew 4:12-5:12

Which city did the believers first call themselves "Christians"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

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