27:3 Judas evidently felt remorse because he realized that he had condemned an innocent man to death. His remorse (Gr. metamelomai) resulted in a kind of repentance (Gr. metanoeo), but it was not complete enough. The first of these two Greek words does not indicate "sorrow for moral obliquity and sin against God, but annoyance at the consequences of an act or course of acts, and chagrin at not having known better."1039Judas was sorry for what he had done and tried to make amends, but He never believed that Jesus was the Son of God (cf. Acts 1:16-19).
27:4 Judas' testimony to Jesus' innocence is an important part of Matthew's witness that Jesus was the Messiah. The response of the Sanhedrin members likewise proved their guilt. It should have meant something to them that Judas said that Jesus was innocent. Judas betrayed innocent blood, and they condemned innocent blood.1040They were wrong in thinking they could avoid responsibility for Jesus' death because of Judas' guilt in betraying Him.
"They are guileful' and callous,' purchasing the services of Judas to betray Jesus yet leaving Judas to his own devices in coming to terms with his burden of guilt (26:14-16; 27:3-4)."1041
27:5-8 Judas threw the 30 pieces of silver that he had received for betraying Jesus into the temple sanctuary somewhere. Perhaps Judas thought he could atone for his sin to some extent with this gift. Then he went out and hanged himself (cf. 2 Sam. 17:23 LXX). Many scholars believe this was in the region of gehenna, the city dump of Jerusalem, near the confluence of the Kidron and Hinnom valleys south of the city.
The chief priests properly refused to receive the silver into the temple treasury (cf. Deut. 23:18). Here again they appear scrupulous about ritual observance of the law while at the same time they failed to defend what is more important, namely the innocence of Jesus (cf. 12:9-14; 15:1-9; 23:23: 28:12-13). They decided to use the money for a public project, a graveyard for foreigners. The place they used had evidently been an area of land from which potters obtained their clay but which by now had become depleted.
The account of Judas' death in Acts 1:18-19 is slightly different, but it is easy to harmonize the two stories. Probably the chief priests bought the grave with Judas' money. Judas evidently hanged himself, and then the corpse apparently fell to the ground and burst open. Perhaps the branch from which he hanged himself broke, or his body may have fallen when it began to decompose. The place of his suicide could have received the name "field of blood"before or after Judas' death. If before, Judas may have chosen to kill himself on the field that his money had purchased. It seems more likely, however, that the Sanhedrin pruchased the field sometime after the events of this night.
27:9-10 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.1042
"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."1043
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 11 and 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 vv. 9-10, is not identificationof the text withan event but fulfillmentof the text inan event, based on a broad typology governing how both Jesus and Matthew read the OT . . ."1044
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 11 not just several verbal parallels but a pattern of apostasy and rejection that found its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus.1045
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.1046However, it is uncertain that the Book of Jeremiah occupied this leading position in the third division of the Hebrew Bible in Matthew's day.
