Making Void the Word of God (7:9–13)
Jesus tells the Pharisees and scribes that they honor God with their lips while their heart is far from him, and he quotes Isa 29:13 in support (Mark 7:6–8). But then, in verses 9–10, he stops quoting the prophet and instead quotes from the Law.
For Moses said, “Honor your father and your mother”; and, “Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die” (7:10).
Jesus quotes two separate commands from Exodus. The first, Exod 20:12, is the fifth commandment of the Decalogue. The second, Exod 21:17, is the penalty attached to breaking the fifth commandment; it is part of the case law that follows the Ten Words in Israel’s legal code. Jesus cites the command, together with the sentence Israel’s own law once attached to violating it, against a practice the Pharisees condone and possibly even promote.
The tradition works like this:
“If a man tells his father or his mother, ‘Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban’ (that is, given to God), then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother” (7:11–12).
Corban transliterates the Hebrew קָרְבָּן (qorban), the standing term in Leviticus for a sacrificial offering (e.g., Lev 1:2). To declare something corban removed it permanently from ordinary use by dedicating it to God. The son need not have spent a cent on himself; later rabbinic discussion of this kind of vow shows no workaround that let him secretly reap the benefit of what he had declared corban. The vow itself was the problem.
Once support for his parents was named corban, giving it to them would violate the dedication, so filial support became permanently unavailable no matter what he did with the rest of his property. Devotion to God had become a legal wall against caring for one’s parents. The Mishnah later agrees with Jesus on this point, ruling that a vow harming one’s parents does not stand (m. Nedarim 9:1). Whatever earlier practice allowed, it did not survive scrutiny within Judaism’s own legal tradition.
Jesus names this “making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down,” and adds, “many such things you do” (7:13). Mark 7:9–13 diagnoses something larger than one loophole. It’s asking us to think about what happens when religious language and tradition are allowed to override the Word of God. To be clear, it’s not that traditions are bad, but rather that all traditions, religious practices, and spiritual habits must be submitted to the Word of God. Even more than this, we should be cautious about using those sorts of things as excuses not to engage in the equally, if not more, important things that God has called us to.
The Children First, and Then the Nations (7:24–30)
The promise to Israel was always wider than Israel alone. When Yahweh first called Abram out of Ur, the call carried within it a horizon that reached past Abram’s own descendants:
“I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing… and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:2–3).
Israel was chosen for the nations. The blessing flowed inward in order to flow outward. Israel’s prophets carried this vision forward.
According to Isaiah, Yahweh says that it was “too light a thing” for the servant to raise up only the tribes of Jacob, and so the servant would be given “as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa 49:6). The foreigners who joined themselves to the Lord would be brought to his holy mountain and made joyful in his house of prayer, “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isa 56:7). And on that mountain Yahweh would prepare a feast, “a feast of rich food for all peoples” (Isa 25:6).
But the promise has a structure: Israel first, and then through Israel, the nations. Not Israel instead of the nations. Not the nations instead of Israel. Israel first, so that the nations might be brought in.
In Mark 7, Jesus has just dismantled one wall separating Jews from Gentiles. The pericope on defilement closes with the parenthetical “thus he declared all foods clean” (7:19), undoing the food-purity boundary that had separated Israel from the Gentile world since Sinai. The very next scene crosses the corresponding people-boundary:
“And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon… a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter” (7:24–26).
Food, then people. The two walls fall in sequence.
Then comes the difficult line:
“Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (7:27).
The crucial word is “first,” πρῶτον. Jesus is not refusing the woman; he is naming the sequence the prophets had already taught. The bread of the kingdom comes to Israel first, and then, through Israel, to the nations. This is the same logic Paul will later articulate as “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom 1:16). The image of bread and table belongs to the Isaianic banquet, where Yahweh sets out a feast for all peoples, but the table is laid in Zion, and the children of the house are seated first.
The woman hears the sequence and steps into it:
“Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (7:28).
Her answer is a confession of how the covenant actually works. She does not ask Jesus to reverse the order. She asks for what the Abrahamic promise has always made room for: that the abundance given to the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is so great that the blessings overflow to the Gentiles as well.
Jesus answers: “For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter” (7:29). The woman goes home and finds the child well.
The Gentile mission of the church is not an emergency improvisation after Israel’s failure. It is the goal toward which the covenant has been moving since Genesis 12. The woman in Mark 7 is not breaking into the kingdom from outside. She is the first sign that the table Yahweh promised in Isaiah is being set, and that the bread laid out for the children of Israel is already abundant enough to reach the nations.
Beyond All Measure (7:31–37)
There is a moment near the end of Mark 7 where the crowd’s response pushes the Greek language to its limit. When Jesus heals a deaf man in the Decapolis, Mark tells us the witnesses were ὑπερπερισσῶς ἐξεπλήσσοντο (hyperperissōs exeplēssonto) — “astonished beyond all measure” (Mark 7:37). The word ὑπερπερισσῶς is a genuine hapax legomenon, which means that it appears nowhere else in all of known Greek literature. Mark takes an ordinary word for “exceedingly” and stacks the preposition ὑπέρ (hyper), meaning “above” or “beyond,” onto the front of it, as if ordinary amazement is simply insufficient for what they have just witnessed. Mark reaches for a word that does not quite exist.
What the witnesses saw was this: Jesus privately took aside a deaf man with a speech impediment, touched his ears, spat, touched the man’s tongue, looked up to heaven, and sighed deeply. Then he said a single Aramaic word — ephphatha (transliterated as ἐφφαθά), “Be opened” — and the man’s ears were unstopped, and his tongue was loosed (Mark 7:31–35). The crowd’s reaction follows.
And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak” (Mark 7:37).
That final line is not merely an expression of surprise. It is a confession, and Mark intends his readers to hear its Old Testament register. The prophet Isaiah, describing the return of YHWH to Zion with his people, wrote:
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. (Isa 35:5–6)
Isaiah’s vision was of a new exodus — God returning to redeem and restore his people, healing what their idolatry and exile had broken. When the crowd echoes Isaiah’s language in the Decapolis, Mark is signaling that the moment the prophets anticipated has arrived. Jesus is not performing miracles for their own sake. Each healing is a signpost to a larger reality: YHWH has returned to his people in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and the new exodus has begun.
This is why the crowd cannot stay silent. Jesus commands them to say nothing (Mark 7:36), but the more he charges them, the more zealously they proclaim it. Ordinary words are insufficient. Ordinary composure is impossible. Mark invents a new word because nothing else will fit the moment.
The same Gospel that opened deaf ears in Galilee is still being proclaimed today. May it still astonish us beyond all measure.