The meek shall inherit the earth

Matthew 5:5 is the fifth verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. It is the third verse of the Sermon on the Mount, and also third of what are known as the Beatitudes.

In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads:

The World English Bible translates the passage as:

This well known verse is perhaps the most famous of the Beatitudes. Unlike the previous two, however, this one has no parallel in Luke's Sermon on the Plain. Luke's Sermon contains four Beatitudes and four Woes. There is considerable debate over whether this Beatitude was in Q, and Luke left it out, or if it is an original addition by the author of Matthew. Gundry's theory is that the author of Matthew wanted to remove the woes for later use against the Pharisees in Matthew 23, however he wanted to keep the same eightfold structure and thus needed to create four new sayings. He sees this verse as essentially just a rephrasing of Matthew 5:3, this same wording is also found at Psalm 37:11. Meek and poor, which can also be translated as humble, mean essentially the same thing. Schweizer feels meek should be understood as meaning powerless.

Another perspective: In Strong's Greek concordance #4239 it refers to Praus as being mild or gentle but it is not suggesting weakness but instead the way power is handled. It is "strength under control". It is demonstrating power without undue harshness. The English language does not have a word that translates conveying both gentleness and power together.

The phrase "inherit the earth" is also similar to "theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven" in Matthew 5:3. Schweizer notes that two terms reflect the two different views of the end times current when Matthew was writing. One view was that the end of the world would see all the believers brought up to join the Kingdom of Heaven. The other view was that the end times would have God come down to directly rule Earth, and the chosen people would then be given dominion over the entire world. Hill does not see the two verses referring to different things. He does not feel that word "earth" means the physical world. Rather he notes that Deuteronomy 4:1 and Deuteronomy 16:20 both use the word inherit to refer to the Israelites taking possession of the Holy Land. Hill feels that earth, which can also be translated as land, is an allusion to the new Holy Land, which might not be on Earth. A refined meaning of this phrase has been seen to say that those that are quiet or nullified will one day inherit the world.

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