Nice, that makes perfect sense. That was really a bizarre metaphor even if it got the point across. Why would someone try to thread a needle with a camel?
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yeahhh. . . “supposedly”, but reading it in the full context it sure sounds like the opposite.
2 “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat.
3 So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.
4 They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
Or arguably not. You’ll find plenty of people on the internet arguing that comparing stuff to camels and needles was perfectly normal at the time.
See here for an example:
http://www.biblicalhebrew.com/nt/camelneedle.htm
There does appear to some support for the argument that a camel or some other large animal was used as a metaphor for something very large and a needle’s eye as a metaphor for a very small space.
If that argument is correct he’d have been referencing an allegory/metaphor wellknown to his audience or at least the religiously studied part of it.
Things that are perfectly well understood to those in the know at the time can be completely incomprehensible to later generations.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra indeed.
(see, that reference will mystify anyone not familiar with ST:NG).
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It definitely makes sense either way, with the meaning unchanged, as long as one is aware of what the eye of the needle is and what a camel is. There is something more elegant and direct about it refering to a rope as there is direct relationship between a rope and a thread and the visualization of this would be more immediate. It wasn’t until today that I was even aware that there were serious discussions about the origin of this.
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“…easier for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is for the Sunday Times to fit through a standard letter box.”
Yup. Still works.
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It is isn’t it.
I didn’t know anything about it either until Tamsin_Bailey posted it.
It’s very cool. In a “I like to party. And by party, I mean engage in biblical hermeneutics” sort of way.
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Yes, just much less accessible to the common person. I adore Garfunkel and Oates!
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