Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 5:22

"but I say unto you, that every one who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire." — Matthew 5:22 (ASV)

I say to you — The I is emphasized in the Greek. This emphasis on I was likely what, more than anything else, led to the feeling of wonder expressed in Matthew 7:28-29. The scribe in his teaching invariably referred to this rabbi and that; the new Teacher spoke as one having a higher authority of His own.

Angry ... without a cause — The last three words are absent from many of the best manuscripts. They may have been inserted to soften the apparent harshness of the teaching, but if so, it must have been at an early date, before the fourth century. On the other hand, they may have been in the text originally and were removed for giving too wide a margin to vain and vague excuses. Ethically, the teaching is not that the emotion of anger, with or without a cause, stands on the same level of guilt as murder. Instead, the point is that anger so quickly expands and explodes into murder that it, too, will be brought to trial. It will be sentenced according to the specifics of each case: the reason for the anger, the degree to which it was controlled or nurtured, and so on. As no earthly tribunal can judge emotions as such, the “judgment” here is clearly that of the Unseen Judge, who deals with offenses that, in His eyes, are of the same nature as those that come before human judges. Does any man hate the thing he would not kill?

Raca — As far as the dictionary sense of the word goes, it is the same as that of the “vain fellows” of Judges 9:4, Judges 11:3, and Proverbs 12:11. But all words of abuse depend for their full force on popular association, and raca, like words of similar meaning in our own language, was in common use to express not only anger but insolent contempt. The temper condemned is that in which anger has so far gained mastery that we no longer recognize a “brother” in the man who has offended us, but look on him with malignant scorn.

The council — Offenses of this kind are placed by our Lord on the same level as those that came before the great court of the Sanhedrin. That word, though it looks like Hebrew, is really only a transliterated form of the Greek word for council. The court consisted of seventy or seventy-two members, with a president and vice-president, and was made up of the heads of the twenty-four courses of the priests, with forty-six or forty-eight (it is not known how they were chosen) from the “elders” and “scribes.” Like the Areopagus at Athens, it presided over cases—as in the case of our Lord (Matthew 26:65) and Stephen (Acts 6:13)—of blasphemy and other similar offenses, and its peculiar prerogative was that it could order death by stoning. The point of our Lord’s teaching was, therefore, that to scorn God’s image in man is to do dishonor to God Himself. We cannot truly fear God unless we also honour all men (1 Peter 2:17). The reverence for humanity as such must extend even to the man who has most provoked us. In the unseen, eternal world, the lack of that reverence has its own appropriate punishment.

You fool — The Greek word rendered this way agrees accidentally in its consonants with the Hebrew word translated “rebel” (m’re) in Numbers 20:10. For this reason, some have thought that we have here, as with raca, a common Hebrew term of contempt. There is no evidence, however, that the word was used this way, and it is more probable that the Greek is a translation of some word which, like the “fool” of the Old Testament, implied utter godlessness as well as a lack of intellectual wisdom, as in Psalm 14:1. With that meaning, it embodied the temper not of petulant contempt, like that represented by raca, but of fixed and settled hatred. That it was the temper and not the utterance of the mere syllables that our Lord condemned is seen in the fact that He Himself used the word of the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23:17, 19), and St. Paul used it of the skeptical Greek materialist (1 Corinthians 15:36). The very same word might spring from a righteous indignation or from malignant hatred.

Of hell fire — Literally, of the Gehenna of fire. Great confusion has arisen here and elsewhere from the use of the same English word for two Greek words with very different meanings:

1. Hades, answering to the Sheol (also usually translated “hell”) of the Old Testament, is the unseen world, the region or state of the dead, without any reference to their blessedness or misery.
2. Gehenna, which had come to represent among the later Jews (not in the time of any Old Testament writer) the place of future punishment.

The history of the word is worth studying. Originally, it was the Greek form of Ge-hinnom (the Valley of Hinnom, sometimes of the “son” or the “children” of Hinnom) and was applied to a narrow gorge on the south of Jerusalem (Joshua 15:8). There Solomon erected a high place for Molech (1 Kings 11:7). There the fires of that god had received their bloody offerings of infant sacrifice under Ahaz and Manasseh (2 Kings 16:3; 2 Chronicles 28:3; 2 Chronicles 33:6). In his great work of reformation, Josiah defiled it, probably by casting the bones of the dead and other filth upon it (2 Kings 23:10–14). When the Jews returned from captivity, they showed their abhorrence of their fathers’ idolatry by making it, as it were, the place where they cast out all the refuse of the city.

Outwardly, it must have been foul to sight and smell, and thus it became, before our Lord’s time, a parable of the final state of those in whom all has become vile and refuse. The thought first appears in the Targum or Paraphrase of Isaiah 33:14 (“Gehenna is the eternal fire”). It is often said that fires were kept burning to consume the solid refuse, which added to the horror of the scene, but of this there is no adequate evidence, though it is suggested by this passage and Mark 9:48. Here, the analogy of the previous clauses also suggests the thought that the bodies of great criminals were sometimes deprived of burial rites and cast out into the Valley of Hinnom; but of this, too, there is no evidence, though it is probable enough in itself.

In any case, the meaning of the clause is obvious. Our passing words, which express states of feeling—and not only the overt act of murder—are subject to the judgment of the Eternal Judge and may bring us into a guilt and a penalty like that of the vilest criminals.