Matthew 15:27-37

27 But she said, Yea, Lord; for even the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the table of their masters.
28 Then Jesus answering said to her, O woman, thy faith [is] great. Be it to thee as thou desirest. And her daughter was healed from *that* hour.
29 And Jesus, going away from thence, came towards the sea of Galilee, and he went up into the mountain and sat down there;
30 and great crowds came to him, having with them lame, blind, dumb, crippled, and many others, and they cast them at his feet, and he healed them:
31 so that the crowds wondered, seeing dumb speaking, crippled sound, lame walking, and blind seeing; and they glorified the God of Israel.
32 But Jesus, having called his disciples to [him], said, I have compassion on the crowd, because they have stayed with me already three days and they have not anything they can eat, and I would not send them away fasting lest they should faint on the way.
33 And his disciples say to him, Whence should we have so many loaves in [the] wilderness as to satisfy so great a crowd?
34 And Jesus says to them, How many loaves have ye? But they said, Seven, and a few small fishes.
35 And he commanded the crowds to lie down on the ground;
36 and having taken the seven loaves and the fishes, having given thanks, he broke [them] and gave [them] to his disciples, and the disciples to the crowd.
37 And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was over and above of the fragments seven baskets full;

Footnotes 3

  • [a]. Or else we may say 'Yet' here, as admitting the truth, but pleading; nai is used for affirming what is said, but also for beseeching, as, indeed, in English we say, 'Yes, do it.' 'Yet' seems perhaps to express this more clearly, as the admission of what Christ said is thus evident; the 'but' is wanting if we say 'yea.' The Authorized Version avoids the difficulty discussed by all the critics by translating freely, but the 'for even' of the original is lost. 'Yet' thus used gives assent and obsecration, and this seems the force of nai. See Rev. 22.20, 'Amen; come.' If we say 'Truth, Lord,' we must add 'yet:' 'Truth, Lord, [yet hear] for even.' As to nai having this tacitly beseeching character, see Philemon 20, and so it is taken by many. Otherwise nai contradicts the Lord, who had said ouk, and kai gar follows naturally. And I suspect this to be the better sense: 'Yes, Lord, you may do it, for even:' so I have put it in the text.
  • [b]. See Note, ch. 5.25; Mark 4.12.
  • [c]. Larger than the 'hand-basket' in ch. 16.9. It is particularly a 'fish-basket.'
The Darby Translation is in the public domain.