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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comRobertson Word Pictures - Matthew 19:24 - 19:24
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It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye (eukopōteron estin kamēlon dia trēmatos rhaphidos eiselthein). Jesus, of course, means by this comparison, whether an eastern proverb or not, to express the impossible. The efforts to explain it away are jejune like a ship’s cable, kamilon or rhaphis as a narrow gorge or gate of entrance for camels which recognized stooping, etc. All these are hopeless, for Jesus pointedly calls the thing “impossible” (Mat 19:26). The Jews in the Babylonian Talmud did have a proverb that a man even in his dreams did not see an elephant pass through the eye of a needle (Vincent). The Koran speaks of the wicked finding the gates of heaven shut “till a camel shall pass through the eye of a needle.” But the Koran may have got this figure from the New Testament. The word for an ordinary needle is rhaphis, but, Luke (Luk 18:25) employs belonē, the medical term for the surgical needle not elsewhere in the N.T.