Matthew 5:22

The insertion of εἰκῆ after αὐτοῦ dates from very ancient MSS., but א and B omit, also Vulgate and Æth. Verss. and Origen twice. The feeling which prompted its insertion as a marginal note would tend to retain it in the text.

22. ἔνοχος, lit. ‘held fast by,’ (ἐνέχω) so ‘liable to’ with dative. It is frequently used in this technical judicial sense by Plato, the Attic Orators and the later historians, as Polybius and Diod. Siculus. When ἔνοχος is followed by a genitive some word like δίκῃ or γραφῇ should be supplied. See ch. Matthew 26:66 and Mark 3:26 (where ἁμαρτήματος not κρίσεως is the true reading). εἰς τὴν γέενναν is not a change for the dative, but denotes the extent to which the sentence might go ‘subject to a penalty extending to the Gehenna of fire’—usque ad pœnam Gehennæ. The extremity of human punishment is meant with the underlying thought of the figurative sense of Gehenna. See infra.

τῇ κρίσει, to the judgment of the lower court, whose jurisdiction was limited.

ῥακά. A word of contempt, said to be from a root meaning to ‘spit’. The distinction between Raca and Thou fool is lost, and naturally, for they belong to that class of words, the meaning of which depends entirely on the usage of the day. An expression innocent and unmeaning in one age becomes the watchword of a revolution in another. There is, however, clearly a climax. (1) Feeling of anger without words. (2) Anger venting itself in words. (3) Insulting anger. The gradation of punishment corresponds; liable (1) to the local court; (2) to the Sanhedrin; (3) to Gehenna.

συνεδρίῳ. See note ch. Matthew 26:3.

γέενναν τοῦ πυρός. ‘Gehenna of fire, i.e. burning Gehenna’. Gehenna is the Greek form of the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom or ‘Valley of Hinnom,’ sometimes called ‘Valley of the sons of Hinnom’, also ‘Tophet’ (Jeremiah 7:31). It was a deep narrow glen S.W. of Jerusalem, once the scene of the cruel worship of Moloch; but Josiah, in the course of his reformation, ‘defiled Tophet, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Moloch’ (2 Kings 23:10). Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost, I.

‘First Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood
Of human sacrifice and parents’ tears;

Though, for the noise of drums and timbrels loud,
Their children’s cries unheard that passed through fire
To his grim idol’.
After that time pollutions of every kind, among them the bodies of criminals who had been executed, were thrown into the valley. From this defilement and from its former desecration Gehenna was used to express the abode of the wicked after death. The words ‘of fire’ are added, either because of the ancient rites of Moloch, or, if a Rabbinical tradition is to be credited, because fires were always burning in the valley.

τοῦ πυρός. The adjectival genitive may be illustrated from classical Greek ἄστρων εὐφρόνη, ‘the starry night,’ Soph. El. 19. χιόνος πτέρυγι, ‘a snowy wing,’ Antig. 114. τραύματα αἵματος, ‘bloody wounds,’ Eur. Phœn. 1616. See Donaldson’s Greek Grammar, § 454. But in this and other instances in the N.T. this genitive may be referred to a Hebrew usage due partly to the comparative scarcity of adjectives in the Hebrew language, partly to the vividness and poetry of oriental speech.