Matthew 10:14 is the fourteenth verse in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. Content In the original Greek according to Westcott-Hort for this verse is: Καὶ ὃς ἐὰν μὴ δέξηται ὑμᾶς μηδὲ ἀκούσῃ τοὺς λόγους ὑμῶν, ἐξερχόμενοι τῆς οἰκίας ἢ τῆς πόλεως ἐκείνης, ἐκτινάξατε τὸν κονιορτὸν τῶν ποδῶν ὑμῶν. In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads: And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. The New International Version translates the passage as: If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. Analysis Both Luke and Mark add, "for a testimony against them." Lapide puts forth three possible reasons for shaking off of the dust: 1) To show their labour in reaching the city, and yet that "it had profited them nothing." 2) To declare even the dust, as impious, because of the unworthy inhabitants, and so "signifying a curse on them," wanting nothing to do with them. 3) As a witness "for the day of judgment against their unbelief and wickedness." Commentary from the Church Fathers Hilary of Poitiers: "The Apostles salute the house with the prayer of peace; yet so as that peace seems rather spoken than given. For their own peace which was the bowels of their pity ought not to rest upon the house if it were not worthy; then the sacrament of heavenly peace could be kept within the Apostles own bosom. Upon such as rejected the precepts of the heavenly kingdom an eternal curse is left by the departure of the Apostles, and the dust shaken from their feet; And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye go out of that house, or that town, cast the dust off your feet. For he that lives in any place seems to have a kind of fellowship with that place. By the casting the dust off the feet therefore all that belonged to that house is left behind, and nothing of healing or soundness is borrowed from the footsteps of the Apostles having trod their soil." Rabanus Maurus: " Otherwise; The feet of the disciples signify the labour and progress of preaching. The dust which covers them is the lightness