Matthew 13: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Jesus sits in a boat by the sea and teaches large crowds in parables: the sower and four kinds of soil, the weeds sown among the wheat, the mustard seed and the leaven. Indoors, away from the crowds, he tells his disciples the parables of the hidden treasure, the pearl, and the fishing net. He tells his disciples why he teaches this way, explains the parable of the sower to them, and later, indoors and away from the crowds, explains the parable of the weeds. He then goes to his hometown, where the people take offense at him because they know his family, and he does not do many miracles there because they do not believe.

Claim by Claim

1. 13:1
   • On that same day Jesus went out of the house.
   • Jesus sat beside the sea.
2. 13:2
   • Great crowds gathered to him.
   • Because of the crowds he got into a boat and sat there.
   • The whole crowd stood on the shore.
3. 13:3
   • He spoke many things to them in parables.
   • He said that a sower went out to sow.
4. 13:4
   • As he sowed, some seed fell beside the path.
   • Birds came and ate that seed up.
5. 13:5
   • Other seed fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil.
   • That seed sprang up immediately because the soil had no depth.
6. 13:6
   • When the sun rose, the sprouted seed was scorched.
   • It withered because it had no root.
7. 13:7
   • Other seed fell among thorns.
   • The thorns grew up and choked that seed.
8. 13:8
   • Other seed fell on good ground and produced fruit.
   • Some produced a hundredfold.
   • Some produced sixtyfold.
   • Some produced thirtyfold.
9. 13:9
   • The one who has ears to hear is to hear.
10. 13:10
    • The disciples came to Jesus.
    • The disciples asked him why he spoke to the people in parables.
11. 13:11
    • Jesus answered them.
    • He said it has been given to the disciples to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.
    • He said it has not been given to those others.
12. 13:12
    • Whoever has will be given more.
    • Whoever has will have abundance.
    • From whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away.
13. 13:13
    • Jesus said he speaks to them in parables for this reason.
    • Though seeing, they do not see.
    • Though hearing, they do not hear.
    • They do not understand.
14. 13:14
    • In them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled.
    • The prophecy says they will hear and hear and not understand.
    • The prophecy says they will see and see and not perceive.
15. 13:15
    • This people's heart has grown dull.
    • They have heard heavily with their ears.
    • They have closed their eyes.
    • The purpose stated is that they should not see with their eyes.
    • The purpose stated is that they should not hear with their ears.
    • The purpose stated is that they should not understand with their heart.
    • The purpose stated is that they should not turn back.
    • God says he would heal them if they turned.
16. 13:16
    • The disciples' eyes are blessed because they see.
    • The disciples' ears are blessed because they hear.
17. 13:17
    • Jesus said truly to them.
    • Many prophets and righteous men desired to see what the disciples see.
    • Those prophets and righteous men did not see it.
    • They desired to hear what the disciples hear.
    • They did not hear it.
18. 13:18
    • Jesus told the disciples to hear the parable of the sower.
19. 13:19
    • When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes.
    • The evil one snatches away what was sown in that person's heart.
    • That person is the one sown beside the path.
20. 13:20
    • The one sown on rocky places is the one who hears the word.
    • He immediately receives the word with joy.
21. 13:21
    • He has no root in himself.
    • He lasts only for a time.
    • When tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, he immediately falls away.
22. 13:22
    • The one sown among the thorns is the one who hears the word.
    • The care of this age and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word.
    • He becomes unfruitful.
23. 13:23
    • The one sown on the good ground is the one who hears the word and understands it.
    • He bears fruit and produces.
    • Some produces a hundredfold.
    • Some produces sixtyfold.
    • Some produces thirtyfold.
24. 13:24
    • Jesus set another parable before them.
    • He said the kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field.
25. 13:25
    • While the men slept, the man's enemy came.
    • The enemy sowed tares among the wheat.
    • The enemy went away.
26. 13:26
    • When the blade sprouted and produced fruit, the tares also appeared.
27. 13:27
    • The servants of the householder came to him.
    • The servants addressed him as sir.
    • The servants asked whether he had not sown good seed in his field.
    • The servants asked where the tares came from.
28. 13:28
    • The householder said to them that an enemy man did this.
    • The servants asked him whether he wanted them to go and gather the tares up.
29. 13:29
    • The householder said no.
    • He said that in gathering the tares they might uproot the wheat along with them.
30. 13:30
    • He said to let both grow together until the harvest.
    • He said that at harvest time he will tell the reapers to gather the tares first.
    • He said the reapers are to bind the tares in bundles to burn them.
    • He said the reapers are to gather the wheat into his barn.
31. 13:31
    • Jesus set another parable before them.
    • He said the kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed.
    • He said a man took the seed and sowed it in his field.
32. 13:32
    • The mustard seed is smaller than all the seeds.
    • When it is grown it is greater than the garden plants.
    • It becomes a tree.
    • The birds of the sky come and nest in its branches.
33. 13:33
    • Jesus spoke another parable to them.
    • He said the kingdom of heaven is like leaven.
    • He said a woman took the leaven and hid it in three measures of flour.
    • He said it stayed there until the whole was leavened.
34. 13:34
    • Jesus spoke all these things to the crowds in parables.
    • He spoke nothing to them without a parable.
35. 13:35
    • This was so that what was spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled.
    • The prophet said, I will open my mouth in parables.
    • The prophet said, I will utter things hidden from the foundation of the world.
36. 13:36
    • Then Jesus left the crowds.
    • Jesus went into the house.
    • His disciples came to him.
    • The disciples asked him to explain to them the parable of the tares of the field.
37. 13:37
    • Jesus answered them.
    • He said the one who sows the good seed is the Son of man.
38. 13:38
    • The field is the world.
    • The good seed are the sons of the kingdom.
    • The tares are the sons of the evil one.
39. 13:39
    • The enemy who sowed the tares is the devil.
    • The harvest is the end of the age.
    • The reapers are angels.
40. 13:40
    • The tares are gathered and burned in fire.
    • So it will be at the end of the age.
41. 13:41
    • The Son of man will send out his angels.
    • The angels will gather out of his kingdom all causes of offense.
    • The angels will gather out of his kingdom those who do lawlessness.
42. 13:42
    • The angels will throw them into the furnace of fire.
    • There will be weeping there.
    • There will be gnashing of teeth there.
43. 13:43
    • Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.
    • The one who has ears to hear is to hear.
44. 13:44
    • The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.
    • A man found the treasure.
    • The man hid the treasure.
    • Out of his joy he goes and sells all that he has.
    • He buys that field.
45. 13:45
    • The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls.
46. 13:46
    • The merchant found one pearl of great value.
    • The merchant went and sold everything he had.
    • The merchant bought the pearl.
47. 13:47
    • The kingdom of heaven is like a net cast into the sea.
    • The net gathered fish of every kind.
48. 13:48
    • When the net was full, they drew it up onto the shore.
    • They sat down.
    • They gathered the good into containers.
    • They threw the bad away.
49. 13:49
    • So it will be at the end of the age.
    • The angels will come out.
    • The angels will separate the wicked from among the righteous.
50. 13:50
    • The angels will throw them into the furnace of fire.
    • There will be weeping there.
    • There will be gnashing of teeth there.
51. 13:51
    • Jesus asked them whether they had understood all these things.
    • They said to him yes.
    • They addressed him as Lord.
52. 13:52
    • Jesus said to them that for this reason every scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder.
    • That householder brings out of his treasure things new and old.
53. 13:53
    • When Jesus had finished these parables, he departed from there.
54. 13:54
    • Jesus came to his own hometown.
    • He taught them in their synagogue.
    • They were astonished.
    • They asked where this man got this wisdom.
    • They asked where this man got these mighty works.
55. 13:55
    • They asked whether this was not the carpenter's son.
    • They asked whether his mother was not called Mary.
    • They named his brothers as James, Joses, Simon, and Judas.
56. 13:56
    • They asked whether all his sisters were not with them.
    • They asked where this man got all these things.
57. 13:57
    • They were offended at him.
    • Jesus said to them that a prophet is not without honor except in his own hometown and in his own house.
58. 13:58
    • He did not do many mighty works there.
    • The reason was their unbelief.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

13:1

"The sea" is the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake about thirteen miles long, ringed by fishing villages. The Gospels also call it a lake.

13:2

The King James "ship" simply meant any boat in 1611. This is a small open fishing boat. Pushing a little offshore let a speaker face a crowd on a sloping beach, which carries sound well.

13:3

A parable is a comparison: a short story or image drawn from ordinary life and set beside the point being made. The underlying Hebrew idea, mashal, covers proverbs, riddles and figures of speech as well as stories, so a parable is not always transparent by design.

13:4

In this farming method the seed went down before the plow, not after. The sower walked the field scattering handfuls broadside, and the field was plowed afterward to turn the seed under. That is why seed lands on the footpath that runs through the field, on rock and among weeds: he is covering the whole ground and sorting it out later.

13:5

"Stony places" does not mean soil with stones in it. In Galilee a thin skin of earth often lies over a shelf of limestone. Such ground warms quickly, so seed sprouts fast, but the roots hit rock and the plant has no reserve of moisture.

13:8

Ancient grain yields ran roughly five to ten times the seed sown, and a tenfold harvest was considered good. Thirty, sixty and a hundred times are extraordinary figures, not ordinary farming.

13:9

"Who hath ears to hear, let him hear" is a set phrase, roughly: this one needs thinking about, do not just let the sound go past you.

13:10

A "disciple" is a learner. In this world a disciple attached himself to a particular teacher, traveled with him, and learned by living alongside him rather than by sitting in classes.

13:11

"Mysteries" translates a Greek word meaning a secret that has now been let out to some people. It does not mean a puzzle nobody can solve, or anything mystical.

13:12

This has the shape of a proverb people already knew, the sort of thing said about money or skill: what gets used grows, and what gets neglected drains away.

13:13

"They seeing see not" copies a Hebrew way of speaking that doubles a verb for emphasis. The sense is that they look and go on looking and still take nothing in.

13:14

Esaias is the Greek spelling of Isaiah. The quotation is Isaiah 6:9-10, given in its Greek form, where the words are a description of what will happen rather than a command to make it happen.

13:15

"Waxed gross" means has grown fat, and so has grown insensitive or unfeeling; the Hebrew image is of a heart thickened over like a callus. "Converted" in 1611 English kept its plain sense of turned around, turned back, without the modern overtone of changing religions.

13:16

"Blessed" is not a wish or a prayer over someone. It is a word of congratulation: you are fortunate, look what you are getting.

13:17

"Verily" renders the Hebrew word amen, placed here at the front of a sentence rather than at the end. Normally amen endorses what someone else has said; used this way it vouches in advance for what the speaker is about to say.

13:19

"The wicked one" is a title for the devil, as verse 39 spells out. The King James phrase reads as a general description of a bad person, which it is not.

13:20

"Anon" in 1611 English meant at once, straight away. It did not mean later on.

13:21

Three King James words have shifted. "Dureth" means endures or lasts. "By and by" meant immediately, the reverse of its modern sense of eventually. "Is offended" translates a Greek verb meaning to be tripped up or made to stumble, so it means he drops away, not that his feelings are hurt.

13:22

"Care" in 1611 English meant anxiety or worry, not caring about something.

13:25

"Tares" are darnel, a weed that mimics wheat so closely that the two cannot be told apart until the heads form, and whose roots tangle with the wheat's. Sowing it in another man's field was a recognized act of sabotage and was punishable under Roman law, so the story describes a crime the first hearers would have known about.

13:26

"Brought forth fruit" here means the wheat headed up and formed grain. That is the moment the darnel becomes visible, because its seed heads are dark and the wheat's are not.

13:27

The "householder" is the head of the estate, the man who owns the land and everyone working it. The "servants" are his household workers, in most cases slaves or bound laborers rather than hired hands who could walk away.

13:29

Darnel roots tangle with wheat roots underground, so pulling up one plant genuinely tears out the other. The farmer is giving a practical reason, not a sentimental one.

13:30

Burning was not only punishment. Darnel stalks were fuel in a country short of firewood, and the weed's seed is toxic, so it had to be kept out of the grain.

13:31

The mustard seed was the smallest seed a farmer there planted. It was a common way of saying "tiny."

13:32

"The least of all seeds" reflects a proverbial expression: a mustard seed was the standard comparison for something tiny, much as we say a grain of sand. Black mustard grows into a shrub eight to ten feet high, large for a garden plant though not a tree in the strict botanical sense. "Herbs" in 1611 meant garden plants in general, not seasonings.

13:33

Leaven is not packaged yeast. It is a lump of dough held back from the previous batch and left to ferment, then worked into the new flour. "Three measures" renders three satons, roughly forty to fifty pounds of flour, which would bake enough bread for a hundred people or more. The verb behind "hid" means to conceal or bury: she works the leaven in until it vanishes into the dough.

13:35

The quotation is Psalm 78:2. The psalm is headed as Asaph's, and Asaph is called a seer in Chronicles, which is why a psalm can be introduced here as spoken "by the prophet."

13:37

"Son of man" is the title Jesus regularly uses for himself in the Gospels. In ordinary Hebrew and Aramaic the phrase just means a human being, but it also echoes Daniel 7:13, where "one like the Son of man" is brought before God and given authority, so the expression carries both senses at once.

13:38

"The children of the kingdom" and "the children of the wicked one" use a Hebrew idiom in which "children of" means people who belong to something or take after it. It is about allegiance and character, not about who anyone's parents were.

13:39

"The end of the world" translates a phrase that means the completion of the age: the close of the present era of history, not the destruction of the planet. The same phrase stands behind the wording in verses 40 and 49.

13:41

"All things that offend" means everything that trips people up or causes them to fall. "Them which do iniquity" translates a phrase meaning those who practice lawlessness, that is, who live as though the law did not apply to them.

13:42

Grinding the teeth together is a standard Hebrew image for fury or extreme distress, used in the Psalms of enemies snarling in rage. It is not a picture of shivering or fear.

13:43

The image of the righteous shining like the sun is borrowed from Daniel 12:3, where those who are wise shine like the brightness of the sky.

13:44

With no banking system, burying valuables in the ground was the normal way to protect them, and invasion or sudden death left caches unclaimed. Under the property customs of the time a find in the ground belonged with the land, so buying the field was how the man made the treasure legally his own.

13:45

A "merchant man" is a wholesale dealer who travels to buy stock, not a shopkeeper. Pearls were among the most expensive goods in the Roman world, ranked alongside gold, and a single fine one could be worth a fortune.

13:47

This is a dragnet: a long weighted net let down from a boat and hauled to the beach, sweeping up everything in its path rather than selecting a catch as a hook or cast net does. Some of what it brings in is always unusable.

13:48

"Bad" fish would include those without fins and scales, which the law of Moses ruled out as food (Leviticus 11:9-12), along with anything too small or otherwise worthless.

13:52

A "scribe" was a professional expert in the law of Moses, trained to copy, interpret and teach it. "Treasure" here means the storeroom or strongbox where a householder keeps his valuables, not the valuables themselves.

13:54

"His own country" means his home district, Nazareth in Galilee. A synagogue was the local assembly and its meeting place, where scripture was read aloud and discussed; a visitor with a reputation could be invited to speak, which is what is happening here.

13:55

"Carpenter" translates tekton, a builder and craftsman who worked in wood and often in stone as well. The point of the question is social: he comes from a working family everyone in town knows. Joses is a form of the name Joseph. The words used for his brothers and sisters are the ordinary Greek words for siblings.

13:57

"Is not without honour" is a double negative meaning is honored, so the sentence reads: a prophet is honored everywhere except at home. The saying had the shape of a proverb. "They were offended in him" uses the same verb as in verse 21: they were tripped up by him, they would not have him.

13:58

The old words "mighty works" mean miracles. Those are wonderful things only God can do.