After Yeshua called the crowd to Him, He said to them, “Hear and understand. It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man.” (Matthew 15:10–11)

The Master was not speaking about Levitical purity at all except to use the purity rubrics to illustrate His point regarding the purity of a person’s heart. Eating defiled food does not make a person’s heart unholy. Whatever a man eats passes through his digestive system and out into the privy. However, things that rise from within a person make the heart unholy.

Rabbi Yeshua was not the first to repurpose the language of ritual purity and consecration to speak about the spiritual defilement incurred by sin. The Scriptures often employ the jargon of ritual purity metaphorically to describe a moral state. For example, David speaks of the righteous man with “clean hands and a pure heart” (Psalm 24:4), and after his own sin, he pleads, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin … purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean” (Psalm 51:2, 7). The prophets also invoked the language of ritual uncleanness and contamination to describe Israel’s idolatry, apostasy, and other sins. Our Master Yeshua taught an internalization of the Torah’s purity laws when He praised the “pure in heart.” In those cases, ritual uncleanness symbolizes sin and guilt. Ritual purity symbolizes innocence and righteousness. Ritual purification symbolizes God’s forgiveness of sins and removal of guilt.

The Master explained to His disciples that the things which come out of a man make his heart unholy. In Matthew’s version of the narrative, Yeshua rattles off seven examples of spiritually defiling sins, mostly corresponding to the Ten Commandments. Mark’s version offers a list of thirteen sins:

For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. (Matthew 15:9)

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. (Mark 7:21–22)

The Master concluded the explanation by saying, “These are the things which [make a man unholy]; but to eat with unwashed hands does not [make a man unholy]” (Matthew 15:20). His final words on the subject bring the entire discussion back to the original point of teaching. The teaching has nothing to do with the dietary laws. The meats of unclean animals and sources of Levitical defilement described by the Torah were outside the scope of His discussion. The teaching pertained to ethical issues—not legal disputes.