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Testament of Dan

Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs

About this book
Chapter 2

1 Now, my children, I am dying, and I tell you truly: unless you keep yourselves from the spirit of falsehood and anger, and love truth and patience, you will surely perish. 2 For anger is blindness, and it keeps a person from seeing anyone else honestly. 3 Whether it is a father or mother, he treats them as enemies; whether a brother, he no longer recognizes him; whether a prophet of the Lord, he disobeys him; whether a righteous man, he ignores him; whether a friend, he refuses to acknowledge him. 4 For the spirit of anger entangles him in a web of lies, blinds his eyes, darkens his mind with falsehood, and forces its own distorted vision upon him.⁠ 5 And how does it blind his eyes? By filling his heart with hatred, so that he grows envious of his own brother.

Texts in conversation

Compare Testament of Dan 2:4 and Matthew 6:23

Pseudepigrapha, Testaments · New Testament

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Summary

In Matthew, Jesus uses language connected to evil eye belief found in Jewish tradition such as the Testament of Dan. Both describe how envy and greed lead to inner darkness and affect vision, also connected to the ancient belief that the eye emits light.

Passages

Testament of Dan 2:4

Pseudepigrapha, Testaments · Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs
3 Whether it is a father or mother, he treats them as enemies; whether a brother, he no longer recognizes him; whether a prophet of the Lord, he disobeys him; whether a righteous man, he ignores him; whether a friend, he refuses to acknowledge him. 4 For the spirit of anger entangles him in a web of lies, blinds his eyes, darkens his mind with falsehood, and forces its own distorted vision upon him. 5 And how does it blind his eyes? By filling his heart with hatred, so that he grows envious of his own brother.
100 BCE – 100 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in the Testament of Dan

Matthew 6:23

New Testament
21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If then your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is diseased, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! 24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
70–90 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in Matthew

References

"... Fear of the evil eye and measures to ward off its harmful glance are attested throughout the regions of the ancient Near East and Circum-Mediterranean (Elliott 1994:52; Kotze 2007:141). Basic to this belief was the notion that certain individuals, animals, demons or gods had the power of injuring any object on which their glance fell ... the eye was not considered as a recipient of external light as in modern understanding, but an active agent. The eye was thought to possess light of 'fire'. The rays the eye emitted had a good or bad effect on the objects on which its glance fell (Allison 1987:65). This concept of an 'active' eye is explained in detail by Plutarch. An evil eye was believed to have the potential to cause harm to other persons or objects. It was thought that the squeezing of the eye when glaring had a stinging effect ... the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs takes up the extramission theory of vision related to evil eye traditions ..."
Francois P. Viljoen, “A Contextualized Reading of Matthew 6:22-23: Your Eye is the Lamp of Your Body,” HvTSt 61.1 (2009): 1–9.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Testament of Dan 2:4 and Matthew 6:23

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