Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 5:18

"For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished." — Matthew 5:18 (ASV)

Verily — The first occurrence in the Gospel of this word, so common in our Lord’s teaching, seems the right place for dwelling on its meaning. It is the familiar Amen of the Church’s worship—the word which had been used in the same way in the worship of the wilderness (Numbers 5:22; Deuteronomy 27:15) and of the Temple (Psalms 41:13; Psalms 72:19, and others). Coming from the Hebrew root for “fixed, steadfast, true,” it was used for solemn affirmation or solemn prayer: “So is it,” or “so be it.” For the most part, the Greek Septuagint translates it; but in 1 Chronicles 16:36 and Nehemiah 5:13, it appears in its Hebrew form. From the worship of the synagogue it passed into that of the Christian Church, and by the time the Gospels were written had become so familiar that it was used without hesitation by all the Evangelists, sometimes singly, sometimes (uniformly in St. John) with the emphasis of reduplication.

Till heaven and earth pass — This formula was probably one in common use by our Lord to express the unchangeableness of the divine word. We must remember that it was afterward used by our Lord with even greater force in reference to His own words (Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33).

One jot or one tittle — The “jot” is the Greek iota (ι), the Hebrew yod (י), the smallest of all the letters of the alphabet. The “tittle” was one of the smaller strokes, or twists of other letters, such as distinguished ד (D) from ר (R), or כ (K) from ב (B). Jewish Rabbis used to caution their scholars against writing in such a way as to cause one letter to be mistaken for another, and to give examples of passages from the Law in which such a mistake would turn a divine truth into nonsense or blasphemy. The yod in its turn was equally important. It distinguished Joshua from Hoshea, and Sarai from Sarah. The Jews indeed had a strange legend that its insertion in the former name was given as a compensation for its exclusion from the latter. The meaning is obvious enough: “Nothing truly belonging to the Law, however seemingly trivial, shall drift away and be forgotten until it has done all that it was meant to do.”

Till all be fulfilled — Literally, Till all things have come to pass. The words in the English version suggest an identity with the “fulfil” of Matthew 5:17, which is not found in the Greek. The same formula is used in the Greek of Matthew 24:34. The “all things” in both cases are the great facts of our Lord’s life, death, resurrection, and the establishment of the kingdom of God. Taken this way, we find that the words do not assert, as they might first seem to do, the perpetual obligation of even the details of the Law, but rather the limit up to which the obligation was to last. They are therefore not inconsistent with the words which speak of the system of the Law as a whole as “decaying and waxing old, and ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13). The two “untils” each have their significance. Each “jot” or “tittle” must first complete its work; then, and not until then, will it pass away.