dokos

The lexical picture is unusually uniform. LSJ derives δοκός from δέχομαι and defines it as a bearing-beam, especially in the roof or floor of a house, with the bar of a gate or door as a secondary sense; BDAG gives "a piece of heavy timber such as a beam used in roof construction or to bar a door." Louw-Nida (7.78) gloss the word as the main beam of a building, set explicitly against κάρφος (3.66). Moulton-Milligan's survey of inscriptions and papyri (Syll.3 587.62 of 329/8 BCE, where δοκοί are priced above the lighter στρωτῆρες laid across them; P. Lond. 280.11 of 55 CE, the timber above an oil press; P. Flor. II 127.5) concludes that "the Oriental hyperbole in Mt 7:3ff. will admit of no tempering from the usage of the word." Secondary senses exist outside the Bible (a beam-shaped meteor in Pliny, Natural History 2.96; a gold ingot in Josephus, Antiquities 14.106; the proverbial tedious speaker, ὁ τὴν δοκὸν φέρων, in Aristotle, Rhetoric 1413b28) but none is in play in the Gospels. Hatch-Redpath list seven Septuagint occurrences (Genesis 19:8; 3 Kingdoms 6:15, 16; 4 Kingdoms 6:2, 5; 2 Paraleipomena 34:11; Canticles 1:17), essentially all rendering קוֹרָה and all concrete; notably the one personified beam in the Hebrew Bible (Habakkuk 2:11, כָּפִיס) is rendered κάνθαρος, not δοκός. TDNT has no article for the word and EDNT's is brief, which suits a concrete noun whose force is rhetorical rather than theological. The commentaries converge on deliberate hyperbole: France calls it a grotesque illustration drawn from the carpenter's workshop, Keener presses its physical absurdity, Nolland and Hagner propose "sawdust" for κάρφος as the matching workshop term, Betz reads 7:3 and 7:4 as hyperbolic questions building to the vocative ὑποκριτά, and Davies-Allison note the shift from βλέπειν in Matthew 7:3 to διαβλέπειν in 7:5. Osborne, Guelich, and Bovon stress that the saying presupposes rather than forbids correction (Leviticus 19:17; Matthew 18:15-17). The pericope is treated throughout as Q material (Q 6:41-42 in the Critical Edition of Q) and recurs in Gospel of Thomas 26 and P.Oxy. 1. On the rabbinic parallel (b. Arakhin 16b in the name of R. Tarfon, with a related saying at b. Bava Batra 15b), it is worth noting that Sifra Kedoshim 4 preserves Tarfon's baraita without the beam and splinter illustration, which some read as evidence that the image is a later accretion in the Bavli, and that the Vilna text has splinter in the teeth against beam in the eyes where some manuscripts read eyes in both halves.