Matthew 23

The seven woes of chapter 23 have generated enormous controversy in Christian history because they were deployed, in later centuries, as anti-Jewish polemic in a context radically different from their origin. In their own context, they are an instance of the tradition of prophetic denunciation that runs from Amos and Isaiah through Jeremiah and Ezekiel — the tradition in which God's spokesmen accused the religious leadership of betraying the covenant. The Dead Sea community used comparable language against the Jerusalem establishment; the Hebrew prophets used it against the priests and kings. The woes are Jewish-internal polemic, composed by a Jewish-Christian author addressing the post-70 rabbinic leadership that his community is in conflict with. That they were subsequently used to justify violence against Jewish communities is a history of misreading that the text itself does not warrant.

The substance of the woes is not a rejection of the Torah or of Jewish practice. It is a sustained accusation of hypocrisy: the problem is not that the Pharisees observe the law but that their observance is for public display rather than genuine practice of justice, mercy, and faithfulness. The cumulative image — gnats strained, camels swallowed; cups cleaned outside, filthy inside; tombs whitewashed, bones within — is the image of religiosity that has substituted the external for the internal, the observable for the genuine. The closing lament over Jerusalem is the chapter's turn from denunciation to grief: the woe-oracle is followed by the voice of one who would have gathered them and they would not. The lament echoes Jeremiah's lament over the city before its fall.