“You tithe mint and rue and every herb”
Woe to you Pharisees! You pay tithes of mint, rue, and every herb, but you disregard justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former. (Luke 11:42 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A complaint about fussy bookkeeping.
The cultural key
Torah required tithes of grain, wine, and oil: field crops. Counting out a tenth of the kitchen-garden herbs goes beyond the written requirement into supererogatory scrupulosity: tithing the garnish. 'Weightier matters' invokes the rabbis' own category of heavy versus light commandments, and the triad of justice, mercy, and faithfulness echoes Micah 6:8. Note the ending: Jesus doesn't cancel the herb-tithe. Luke's herb list swaps dill and cumin for rue and 'every herb,' and his weightier matters are 'justice and the love of God': the triad compressed to its two poles for readers without the rabbinic heavy-and-light vocabulary.
Recovered meaning
Precision about the microscopic has crowded out the massive. It isn't scruple versus freedom; it's proportion: a religious life exact to the leaf while justice goes unweighed.