The Mote and the Beam


The Mote and the Beam is a parable of Jesus given in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7, verses. The discourse is fairly brief, and begins by warning his followers of the dangers of judging others, stating that they too would be judged by the same standard. The Sermon on the Plain has a similar passage in.

Narrative

The New Testament text is as follows:
The first two verses use plural "ye" and "you", and the next three verses use the singular "thou", "thy" and "thine" to the individual.

Interpretation

The moral lesson is to avoid hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and censoriousness. The analogy used is of a small object in another's eye as compared with a large beam of wood in one's own. The original Greek word translated as "mote" meant "any small dry body". The terms mote and beam are from the King James Version; other translations use different words, e.g. the New International Version uses "speck " and "plank". In twenty-first century English a "mote" is more normally a particle of dust – particularly one that is floating in the air – rather than a tiny splinter of wood. The analogy is suggestive of a carpenter's workshop, with which Jesus would have been familiar.
In the analogy, the one seeking to remove the impediment in the eye of his brother has the larger impediment in his own eye, suggesting metaphorically that the one who attempts to regulate his brother often displays the greater blindness and hypocrisy.
A proverb of this sort was familiar to the Jews and appears in numerous other cultures too, such as the Latin proverb of later Roman days referenced by Athenagoras of Athens, meretrix pudicam.