Jesus repeated His point with a second example so no one could miss it. The scribes taught that swearing "by the altar, it is nothing," but swearing "by the gift that is upon it" made a person guilty if he broke his word (Matthew 23:18). Yet a gift became holy only when it was placed on God's altar. Barnes says, "The altar, dedicated to God, gave all the value or holiness to the offering." Gill agrees: "the altar sanctifies the gift, and not the gift the altar." The question shows that their rule honored the gift and ignored the God to whom it was given.

No reply from the scribes or Pharisees is recorded. Jesus answers His own question: "Whoso therefore shall swear by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon" (Matthew 23:20). He follows it to the top: whoever swears by heaven "sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon" (Matthew 23:22). Every oath reaches God.

The altar in the temple was where offerings were given to God. The Law said of the altar, "it shall be an altar most holy: whatsoever toucheth the altar shall be holy" (Exodus 29:37). Gill points to this verse to show the altar made the gift holy, not the reverse.

Gill also connects the scribes' rule to "Korban," a word for a gift devoted to God. He explains that whatever a person swore by Korban, the gift, could never be put to any other use. In Gill's view, this helps explain why they treated an oath by the gift as binding while calling an oath by the altar nothing.

This second question presses the same truth from another angle. What makes an offering holy is not the gift itself but the God who receives it. The altar was set apart to Him, and so it gave meaning to everything placed on it.

Right after this, Jesus says the scribes and Pharisees tithed even "mint and anise and cummin" but "omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith" (Matthew 23:23). Their mistake about the gift and the altar was part of a larger pattern: careful about small things, blind to the main thing.