the tassel worn on the corner of the outer cloak, which the Law of Moses commanded Israelites to wear; more broadly, the edge or fringe of a garment
In everyday Greek the word simply meant the edge or border of something, most often the hem of a piece of cloth, but it could also name the skirts of a country, the foothills of a mountain, or the flank of an army. On its own it carried no religious meaning at all.
The word took on its biblical sense when the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament used it for the tassel that God commanded every Israelite to wear on the corners of the outer cloak (Numbers 15 and Deuteronomy 22). These knotted fringes, called tassels (צִיצִת), were a visible reminder to keep God's commands, and they hung from the corner of the garment, a spot named by a Hebrew word (כָּנָף) that means both "corner" and "wing." By the first century observant Jews wore these tassels openly on the outer garment, and the Greek word had become a natural term for them.
All five Gospel uses reflect that background:
- In four healing scenes the sick reach for the tassel of Jesus' cloak to be made well.
- In the fifth Jesus rebukes leaders who lengthened their own tassels to be admired.
The picture is consistent. Jesus wore the tassels the Law commanded, like any observant Jew of his day, but he condemned turning them into a display of piety. The older English habit of rendering the word "hem" or "border" blurs this: what the sick grasped was not a vague edge of clothing but the specific tasseled corner that marked a faithful Israelite, which is why most modern translations now prefer "fringe" or "tassel."
Whether the healing of the hemorrhaging woman (Matt 9:20, with the parallels Mark 5:25-34 and Luke 8:43-48) deliberately alludes to Malachi 3:20 [MT] / 4:2, "the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings," reading the tassel-bearing corner of the garment as the messianic "wing." The proposal turns on the Hebrew polysemy of כָּנָף (wing / corner of a garment); there is no lexical link in Greek, since the Septuagint of Mal 3:20 uses πτέρυξ, not κράσπεδον.
- majorityNo intended allusion; at most a soft resonance a Jewish audience might sense. The evangelists depict the woman reaching for the tassel of a holy man, and the classical rabbinic sources that link Mal 4:2 to the Messiah do not read בכנפיה as the tassel-bearing corners of his garment.; W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Matthew (ICC), 1988-1997; Ulrich Luz, Matthew (Hermeneia); Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke (Anchor Bible); Joshua N. Tilton, Jerusalem Perspective, 2023
- minorityA deliberate christological allusion to Malachi's "healing in his wings," identifying Jesus as the messianic sun of righteousness; an ancient Christian reading (Ps.-Epiphanius, Photius, Ps.-Chrysostom) revived in modern scholarship.; Dale C. Allison, 'Healing in the Wings of His Garment,' in The Word Leaps the Gap (Eerdmans, 2008), 132-146; Joel Marcus, Mark 8-16 (Anchor Bible, 2009), 839
Disputed
Whether κράσπεδον in the four healing texts (Matt 9:20; 14:36; Mark 6:56; Luke 8:44) denotes the specific ritual tassel (tzitzit) or a generic garment edge/hem. The Matthean self-consistency argument (23:5, paired with phylacteries, fixes the tassel sense, and Matthew reuses the same articular noun at 9:20 and 14:36) has largely won the field.
- majorityThe ritual tassel throughout, on the four-cornered outer cloak commanded by Num 15:38-39 and Deut 22:12; no occurrence means a merely nonritual hem.; W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Matthew (ICC), 1988-1997; Ulrich Luz, Matthew (Hermeneia); BDAG, 3rd ed., s.v. κράσπεδον, p. 564
- minorityThe generic edge/hem in the healing texts, the technical tassel sense reserved for the sharp exchange at Matt 23:5; a lexical hesitation formalized in the standard semantic-domain lexicon and preserved in the older "hem" translation tradition.; Louw-Nida, Greek-English Lexicon Based on Semantic Domains, 6.180 and 6.194