There are three ways of interpreting these passages:
1.) Judas hung himself, then either the noose or the gibbet (like a tree-branch, for example) broke, plummeting Judas down and ‘bursting’ him open
.
2.) The account in Matthew is not so an actual description of Judas’ death but a description of his emotional state. The Greek word “apanchomai” (usually translated as ‘to hang’) can also be mean choking or squeezing one’s self as with great emotion or grief. Note however, while such a meaning is possible in Greek, most instances of the word in literature were used in a physical sense, i.e. hanging.
3.) Matthew was using an Old Testament type in here. The unique combination of “departed” and “hanged himself” in the Greek text of Matthew also occurs in another place in the Septuagint, namely 2 Samuel 17:23:
And Achitophel saw that his counsel was not followed, and he saddled his ***, and rose and departed to his house into his city; and he gave orders to his household, and hanged himself, and died, and was buried in the sepulchre of his father.
Another is Psalm 41:9, which is applied by Jesus to Judas (John 13:18), which in rabbinic tradition is applied to Ahitophel. Thus, this interpretation holds that Matthew does not so much describe Judas’ manner of death here but tries to make the point that Judas fulfilled the ‘type’ of Ahitophel by being a traitor (Ahitophel to King David, and Judas to Jesus, the Son and Root of David) who responded with grief and then died. In this case, Luke’s description of Judas falling and bursting open stands alone as a specific description of what happened to him.
As for who bought the plot of land:
The word used by Matthew for ‘bought’ is
agorazo (literally meaning ‘to go to market’), a verb referring to the transaction of business. It means ‘to purchase’, but can also mean ‘to redeem.’
Meanwhile, the word used by Luke is
ktaomai, meaning “
to get, to acquire, to obtain, to possess, to provide, to purchase.” This word has connotations of ownership that
agorazo does not.
Matthew says that the priests ‘transacted’ to obtain the plot of land, but they did not thereby have possession of it as the money they used to buy the field was technically Judas’; therefore the field was bought in Judas’ name and is legally his (post-humuous?) property.
Some may question the above, saying that Judas threw the money away. However, the money cannot be put back into the Temple treasury (i.e. it cannot belong to the Temple again) as it is blood money (Matt. 27:7-8).
Ancient Eastern peoples regarded the guilt of innocent blood very seriously, and like Pilate the priests wanted nothing to do with the situation. By ancient standards, the money was ‘tainted’, that is, it was rendered ritually unclean. Because the priests wanted to avoid association with ritual uncleanness, they would have bought the field under Judas’ name, whose blood money it was, thus shifting the responsibility to him.
Interesting how the two powers that be who had Jesus killed wanted nothing to do with the responsibility of His blood and tried to shift the blame to the other (Pilate to the crowd, and the priests to Judas)!
