THE EVIL EYE — a fixed Semitic idiom, and not about eyesight or the folk-magic of a curse. A 'good eye' is generosity and a 'bad eye' is stinginess and envy: 'do not eat the bread of a man with an evil eye' (Proverbs 23:6); 'your eye shall not be evil toward your poor brother' (Deuteronomy 15:9). ⚠ Matthew uses the pair twice, and both times inside teaching about MONEY: in the Sermon, where a 'single' eye fills the body with light and an evil one with darkness (6:22-23, three verses before 'you cannot serve God and mammon'), and here, where the householder asks the grumbler 'is your eye evil because I am good?' (20:15). KJV/ASV/NWT keep the eye; NIV translates the sense ('are you envious?') and loses the idiom, and with it the link between the two passages. → first discussed at Matt 20:15