Matthew Chapter 16 verse 6 Holy Bible
And Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
read chapter 16 in ASV
And Jesus said to them, Take care to have nothing to do with the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
read chapter 16 in BBE
And Jesus said to them, See and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
read chapter 16 in DARBY
Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.
read chapter 16 in KJV
read chapter 16 in WBT
Jesus said to them, "Take heed and beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees."
read chapter 16 in WEB
and Jesus said to them, `Beware, and take heed of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees;'
read chapter 16 in YLT
Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerse 6. - The leaven. Christ's thoughts were still fixed on the late disputants, whose powerful influence on popular opinion called for forcible warning. By "leaven" he does not here refer specially to the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Sadducees, as in Luke 12:1, but to the evil influence which they exercised, which was diffused far and wide, and penetrated to all ranks and classes. Their unsound opinions, their inability or disinclination to enter into the spiritual sense of Scripture, vitiated their whole system, and made them dangerous teachers directly they attempted to explain or amplify the letter of Holy Writ. It was this same perverse blindness that led them to refuse to accept Jesus as Messiah in spite of all the proofs which had been brought before them. That leaven, in one aspect, was regarded as a sign of impurity and corruption, we learn from the strict rules which banished it from Divine service, and especially during the Passover season. Says St. Paul, "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump" (Galatians 5:9); and, "Purge out the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, even as ye are unleavened" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Elsewhere Christ makes a distinction between what these teachers taught ex cathedra, and what they put forth on their own authority or what they practised themselves (Matthew 23:2, 3, where see note).
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(6) Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.--The form of the warning was obviously determined by the fact just narrated. The Master saw the perplexed looks and heard the self reproaching or mutually accusing whispers of the disciples, and made them the text of a proverb which was a concentrated parable. As St. Mark gives the words, they stand, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, and of the leaven of Herod," and this, if we have to make our choice, we may believe to have been the form in which they were actually spoken; St. Matthew, or the report which he followed, substituting for the less known Herodians the better known Sadducees. The language of the tetrarch, as has been shown (see Note on Matthew 14:2), implies that Sadduceeism had been the prevailing belief of his life, and the current of Jewish political, not to say religious, sympathies, naturally led the Sadducean priests, courting (as Caiaphas did) the favour of the Roman rulers, to fraternise with the scribes who attached themselves to the party of the tetrarch. (Comp. Acts 5:17.)
