Mè dōte to hagion tois kusin mède balète tous margaritas humōn emprosthen tōn choirōn mèpote katapatèsousin autous en tois posin autōn, kai straphentes hrèxōsin humas.
6 `Do may not give [that which is] holy to the dogs, nor throw your pearls to /before the swine, or they may trample them among their feet, and turn and rip you.
A curious interlude in the Sermon on the Mount. It seems quite separate from the surrounding sayings, which is perhaps evidence that the Sermon was not noted down as one continuous sequence but compiled from scattered jottings.
What is the point Yeshua is making here? Who are the dogs, who are the swine, and are they the same? If they are, the second saying is a restatement of the first, in a manner familiar to us from the Psalms.
One theory is that they are goyim, non-Jews, unbelievers: when the Samaritan woman appealed to Yeshua, his first response was to say that he was sent to help Israel, and that one does not give the children’s food to the dogs. The dogs, here, the kunes in the Greek, are of course not pets like ours: they are at best hounds for hunting, at worst semi-feral scavengers: the word, used of humans, was a term of clear opprobrium. The hagion, that which is holy, might be interpreted as a Temple offering of meat or other food, deposited upon an altar. To throw it to the dogs is an act of desecration.
The swine here might be domestic pigs, but in view of the final verb which means “to wound grievously” I suspect it refers rather to a boar, as well as to the dogs.[1] Why one would be tempted to throw down pearls before a pig or a boar is not made clear, but the image is obviously constructed out of one element of something precious and another element of something unclean (all pigs were unclean) as well as dangerous.
The image, then, is clear and relatively uncomplicated. What about the tenor, though? The simplest explanation is an injunction not to give the Torah to infidels, who not only will not appreciate it and will not be able to be nourished by it but who, so far from thanking you, may in return gore and savage you. And yet the upshot of Yeshua’s teaching, both here in the Sermon and elsewhere, is that the Gentiles are part of the new Israel, and as such both merit and need the new, completed Torah.
This creates a real and pressing problem. One solution is perhaps the following: the dogs and the swine might not be known to be such beforehand, but might prove to be so by their reaction to the holy and the pearls. In which case the injunction is a call to discernment. Be careful, think carefully, about the persons to whom you may preach the new Torah that is the eu-angelion. Because if you misjudge them, not only will it not help them but it may put you in danger. And given the fact that Christianity is in our time the most persecuted religion in the world, such an injunction can be said still to be topical.
[The majority of commentaries I have read see no problem here at all, because they see it as a text for the modern world – example: do not open a boxing-match with prayers; do not hang a crucifix in a night-club. There may be something in that, but it does not interest me: I want to try to understand what Yeshua said and what his hearers (thought they) heard.]
Image: a drawing by Pieter Brueghel Jr (1564-1638), from a series on Flemish proverbs. The Flemish proverbial version is "Do not throw roses before swine".
[1] Many commentaries see this as a Jewish inverted parallellism, reading it as “Do not give what is holy to dogs who will rend you; do not toss pearls before pigs who will trample them underfoot.”
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