A gnat and a camel

Anyone who wanted to keep the law carefully strained their wine or water through a cloth, so as not to swallow a gnat. A gnat counted as unclean. So did a camel, but that was rather bigger.

Jesus exaggerates on purpose, as he often did. In Aramaic, the language he spoke, the words for gnat and camel also sound alike: qalma and gamla. So there may have been a play on words too. In English, straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel became a saying in its own right: fussing over every tiny fault while overlooking what is truly unloving.