Matthew 22:27 records the final death in a made-up story that a group of Sadducees told Jesus to trap him. The verse simply reports that after seven brothers had each married the same woman and died without children, the woman herself died too. The Sadducees were a Jewish party who denied the resurrection of the dead, and they were the ones speaking, with Jesus as the listener. Their story is a stacked hypothetical meant to make the idea of resurrection look absurd.
After them all, the woman died.
Matthew 22:27 (WEB)
What Matthew 22:27 Means
The verse is short because it is the punchline of the setup. The phrase “After them all” tells you the Sadducees have just described a chain of seven brothers, each marrying the widow in turn under the rule of levirate marriage found in Deuteronomy 25. Each brother died without leaving a child, so the woman passed from one to the next. The final sentence, “the woman died,” wraps up the hypothetical by making the question they will pose in the next verse as messy as possible.
What the verse does not do is teach anything about the afterlife on its own. It is a plot device, a narrative detail in a debate. Its purpose is to set up the question “whose wife will she be” in the resurrection. Reading it as a statement of doctrine misses the point; reading it as the opening move in a trap explains why Matthew included it.
The Context of Matthew 22:27
Matthew was written for a Jewish-Christian audience, probably in the later first century, and it is traditionally attributed to the apostle Matthew, the former tax collector. The Gospel is concerned to show Jesus as the true teacher of Israel’s Scriptures, so debates with the religious groups of his day fit its purpose. This scene appears in Matthew 22 after the parable of the wedding feast and the question about paying taxes to Caesar, and it sits within a series of challenges from different parties trying to test him.
The verses just before it, which set up the levirate law quoted from Moses, and the verses just after it, where Jesus answers that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage, frame the whole exchange. Once you see that Jesus’ reply turns the Sadducees’ own premise against them, the bare report of the woman’s death becomes the hinge on which the argument turns.
Key Phrases in Matthew 22:27
1 Corinthians 15:42
So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown perishable; it is raised imperishable.
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Paul describes the resurrection body as sown in corruption and raised in incorruption, which helps explain why earthly marriage patterns do not carry over into the resurrection life that Jesus describes in Matthew 22:30. The verse shows the New Testament pattern of thinking about the body changing rather than simply continuing as before.
Daniel 12:2
Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
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Daniel speaks of many who sleep in the dust of the earth awakening to everlasting life, one of the earliest clear Old Testament statements of resurrection. It gives the background to the belief the Sadducees rejected, showing that Jesus’ teaching grows out of Israel’s own hope rather than departing from it.
A Short Prayer From Matthew 22:27
Lord, you see the tangled questions people bring to you, and you are not troubled by them. Where I have tried to make my hopes about heaven fit neatly into the arrangements of this life, loosen my grip and help me trust your power. Give me steady confidence that the life you promise is larger than anything I can picture, and let that trust shape how I love the people in my life today. Amen.
