Matthew 27:9-10

Matthew 27:9-10

[9] Then  was fulfilled  that which  by  Jeremy  the prophet,  saying,  And  they took  the thirty  pieces of silver,  the price  of him that was valued,  whom  they of  the children  of Israel  did value;  [10] And  gave  them  for  the potter's  field,  as  the Lord  appointed 

What does Matthew 27:9-10 Mean?

Contextual Meaning

This difficult fulfillment seems to be a quotation from Zechariah 11:12-13, but Matthew attributed it to Jeremiah. Probably Matthew was referring to Jeremiah 19:1-13, which he condensed using mainly the phraseology of Zechariah 11:12-13 because of its similarity to Judas" situation. [1] See Mark 1:2-3 and 2 Chronicles 36:21 for other examples of this type of fulfillment involving the fusing of sources. Matthew named only Isaiah and Jeremiah as sources of his quotations ( Matthew 2:17; Matthew 3:3; Matthew 4:14; Matthew 8:17; Matthew 12:17; Matthew 13:14; Matthew 15:7; Matthew 17:9); he left his other prophetic sources unspecified. He also attributed one allusion to Daniel ( Matthew 24:15).
"Joining two quotations from two Old Testament books and assigning them to one (in this case, Jeremiah) was also done in Mark 1:2-3, in which Isaiah 40:3 and Malachi 3:1 are quoted but are assigned to Isaiah. This follows the custom of mentioning the more notable prophet first." [2]
A different explanation of this problem is that Jeremiah was the first book in the prophets division of the Hebrew Old Testament. Jesus quoted Zechariah as from Jeremiah because the Book of Zechariah was in the section of the Hebrew Bible that began with the Book of Jeremiah. [3] However, it is uncertain that the Book of Jeremiah occupied this leading position in the third division of the Hebrew Bible in Matthew"s day. [4]
In Jeremiah 19 Israel"s rulers had forsaken God and made Jerusalem a place for foreign gods. The valley where the prophet delivered his prophecy and where he smashed the vessel received the name "Valley of Slaughter," symbolic of Judah and Jerusalem"s ruin. Similarly in Matthew 26-27 the rejection of Jesus led to the polluting of a field that is symbolic of death and the destruction of Israel, which foreigners were about to bury. In Zechariah 11and in Matthew 26-27 the people of Israel reject God"s shepherd and value him at the price of a slave. In both passages someone throws the money into the temple and eventually someone else uses it to buy something that pollutes.
". . . what we find in Matthew , including Matthew 27:9-10, is not identification of the text with an event but fulfillment of the text in an event, based on a broad typology governing how both Jesus and Matthew read the OT ..." [5]
This understanding of the fulfillment also explains the changes Matthew made in the texts he said the events involving Judas fulfilled. Matthew saw in Jeremiah 19 and Zechariah 11not just several verbal parallels but a pattern of apostasy and rejection that found its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus. [5]2