The Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus. 2 They noticed that some of his disciples were eating bread with common — that is, unwashed — hands. 3 (The Pharisees, and in fact all the Jews, won’t eat unless they wash their hands with a fistful of water, holding to the tradition of the elders.[1] 4 And when they come from the marketplace, they don’t eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions they have received and hold to — washings of cups and pitchers and copper pots and dining couches.)
5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why don’t your disciples walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with common hands?”
6 He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied well about you hypocrites, as it is written:
‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far, far from me. 7 They worship me in vain, teaching human rules as if they were God’s commands.’
8 You let go of the command of God and hold on to the tradition of men.”
9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of setting aside the command of God so you can keep your own tradition. 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ 11 But you say that if a man tells his father or mother, ‘Whatever you might have gained from me is Corban’ (that is, a gift),[2] 12 you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. 13 So you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.”
14 He called the crowd to him again and said, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand. 15 There is nothing outside a person that can make them unclean by going into them. Rather, the things that come out of a person are what make them unclean.”
17 When he had left the crowd and gone into the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 And he said to them, “Are you so without understanding too? Don’t you see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot make them unclean, 19 because it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then goes out into the latrine?” (In saying this, he declared all foods clean.)
20 He went on, “What comes out of a person — that is what makes them unclean. 21 For from within, out of the human heart, come evil thoughts, forbidden sex, thefts, murders, 22 adulteries, greed, wickedness, deceit, shamelessness, an evil eye, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within and make a person unclean.”
24 Jesus got up and went from there to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and didn’t want anyone to know he was there, but he couldn’t escape notice.[3] 25 Right away a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard about him. She came and fell at his feet. 26 The woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she kept asking him to cast the demon out of her daughter.[4]
27 He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.”[5]
28 But she answered him, “Lord, even the little dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
29 And he said to her, “Because of this answer, go. The demon has left your daughter.”
30 She went home and found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
31 Then he left the region of Tyre and went through Sidon toward the Sea of Galilee, into the region of the Decapolis. 32 And they brought him a man who was deaf and could barely speak, and they begged him to lay his hand on him.
33 He took him aside, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spat and touched his tongue. 34 Looking up to heaven, he sighed deeply and said to him, “Ephphatha” — that is, “Be opened.”
35 And his ears were opened, and the bond of his tongue was released, and he began to speak plainly. 36 Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone. But the more he ordered them, the more widely they proclaimed it. 37 They were utterly astonished, saying, “He has done everything well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
Notes
Note 1. The Greek word here, pygmē, literally means “fist,” and it has long puzzled readers — our rendering “with a fistful of water” is one attempt at it. Ancient and later Jewish interpreters took the ritual to mean pouring water over the hands until it reached the wrist, so the phrase may describe the manner of washing rather than an amount. ↩
Note 2. Corban meant property formally dedicated to God. Once something was declared Corban, the vow could not simply be taken back. The declaration could place a person’s wealth off-limits to his aging parents while the vow itself remained technically intact. ↩
Note 3. Tyre was a Gentile city on the Mediterranean coast, part of the Roman province of Syria and outside the territory Herod Antipas governed in Galilee. ↩
Note 4. “Greek” here marks her as a Gentile rather than as Greek by ancestry, and “Syrophoenician” identifies her as one of the Phoenician inhabitants of Roman Syria, from the Tyre-and-Sidon coast. ↩
Note 5. The Greek kynarion is a diminutive of the ordinary word for dog. It can mean a household pet that lives under the table — which fits the woman’s reply about crumbs — but by this period Greek diminutives had often lost their force and simply meant “dog.” Which force the smaller word carries here is not settled. ↩