Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 7:6

"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls before the swine, lest haply they trample them under their feet, and turn and rend you." — Matthew 7:6 (ASV)

That which is holy — The words point to the flesh that has been offered for sacrifice, the “holy thing” of Leviticus 22:6-7, 10, and 16, of which no unclean person, stranger, and all the more, no unclean beast, was to eat. To give that holy flesh to dogs would have seemed to the devout Israelite the greatest of all acts of profanation. Our Lord teaches us that there is a similar risk of desecration in dealing with the even holier treasure of divine truth. Another aspect of the same warning is brought out in the second clause. The fashion of the time had made pearls the costliest of all jewels, as in the parable of Matthew 13:45 (compare also 1 Timothy 2:9), and so they too became symbols of the preciousness of truth. The “dogs” and the “swine,” in their turn, represent distinct forms of evil; the former being here, as in Philippians 3:2 and Revelation 22:15, the type of impurity, and the latter of ferocity. The second comparison may possibly imply, as in a condensed fable, the disappointment and consequent rage of the swine at finding that what they took for grain was only pearls. We must be careful not to present the truth—either in direct teaching or by an undiscerning disclosure of the soul’s deeper religious emotions—in a way that makes people worse and not better than before.

This raises some questions: Are we, then, to classify our fellow men in these categories and think of them as dogs and swine? Is this not forgetting the previous teaching and judging most harshly?

The answer, we may believe, is found in seeing the dogs and swine as representing not men and women as such, but the kinds of passions that make them brutish. As long as people identify with those passions, we must deal cautiously and wisely with them. St. Paul did not preach the gospel to the howling mob at Ephesus or to the “lewd fellows of the baser sort” at Thessalonica. Yet, at another time, he would have told any member of those crowds that he too had been redeemed and might claim an inheritance among those who have been sanctified.

It might be added that we need to be on guard against the brute element in ourselves just as much as in others. There, too, we can desecrate the holiest truths by dealing with them in a spirit of irreverence or passion, or we can cynically jest with our own truest and noblest impulses.