What Does Matthew 27:7 Mean?
They took counsel, and bought the potter's field with them, to bury strangers in.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.THE KEY
The Greek word for “strangers” can also mean “guests,” holding the outsider and the welcomed guest in one word.
THE MEANING
This verse gives strangers a place in the community’s ground, but that place is for burial. The word can also name a guest, so the scene holds an uneasy form of welcome: the outsider receives a place only in death.
THE ROOT
ξένους
xénous
GROWS FROM
ξεν-
xen-
The Greek stem ξεν- names a foreigner or stranger and can also carry the sense of a guest.
The word holds the outsider and the guest in one family, so “strangers” does not mean only anonymous people at a distance. Here the outsider receives ground, but it is ground for burial: welcome and exclusion touch the same place.
ALSO GROWS
xenía: Hospitality or lodging offered to a stranger.
ξενία
This branch shows that the same word family can describe receiving the outsider as a guest.
philoxenía: Hospitality toward strangers.
φιλοξενία
This word family appears in Hebrews 13:2, where the KJV says to “entertain strangers,” giving the guest sense a direct scriptural echo.
THE PATTERN
A stranger’s standing is disclosed by what place a community makes for them.
But the sojourner who sojourns with you shall be to you as one who springs up among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.Do not let slip the opening of your home to strangers, for by it some have sheltered messengers without knowing it.The LORD guards the sojourners. He upholds the fatherless and the widow. But the way of the wicked he makes crooked.THE THREAD
For I hungered, and you gave me food; I thirsted, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you gathered me in.The word ξένος (xénos, “stranger/guest”) is shared by both verses. Here, the stranger is taken in while hungry and thirsty; in Matthew 27:7, strangers receive a place in burial, exposing the distance between hospitality in life and provision in death.
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