A Mote In The Eye or A Sliver Between The Teeth?

Over Shabbos, I was reading a parsha sheet and saw a Kli Yakar on parshat Devarim, about why Moshe delayed until the end of his life to offer the rebuke, and why he did not mention certain sins. The answer -- if he mentioned a particular sin, in which he stumbled also (IIRC hitting the rock), they would reply to his rebuke "take the beam out of your eye."

I recognized this as a quote from Matthew, but it is actually a Talmudic quote as well. In Talmud, it occurs in Arachin, as well as in Bava Batra 15b. So I looked it up. In the latter location, the quote is:

מאי דכתיב (רות א) ויהי בימי שפוט השופטים דור ששופט את שופטיו אומר לו טול קיסם מבין <עיניך> [שיניך] אומר לו טול קורה מבין עיניך אמר לו (ישעיהו א) כספך היה לסיגים אמר לו סבאך מהול במים

R. Johanan further said: What is the import of the words, And it came to pass in the days of the judging of the judges? {A citation from the first verse of Ruth.} It was a generation which judged its judges. If the judge said to a man, 'Take the splinter from between your teeth,' he would retort, 'Take the beam from between your eyes.' If the judge said, 'Your silver is dross,' he would retort, 'Your liquor is mixed with water.'

The business with "Your silver is dross" and the retort is taken from the beginning and and of a pasuk in Yeshaya 1:

כב כַּסְפֵּךְ, הָיָה לְסִיגִים; סָבְאֵךְ, מָהוּל בַּמָּיִם

22 Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water.

The other quote is given to Rabbi Tarfon, in Arachin 16, with the same idea of not accepting rebuke:

תניא א"ר טרפון <תמיהני> [תמה] אני אם יש בדור הזה שמקבל תוכחה אם אמר לו טול קיסם מבין עיניך

However, this quote in Bava Batra is problematic. In fact, Soncino above emended it {following Masoret HaShas) from "take the splinter from between your eyes" to "from between your teeth," following Ein Yaakov's citation of the same.

In fact, you would not expect to find a splinter between (or within) your eyes, but would between your teeth. And we could imagine accidental scribal error at work here, duplicating the later usage of "between your eyes."

Then again, why would anyone find a beam between {/in} his eye?

However, there is another early attestation of this phrase, which we should not overlook. From the beginning of Matthew 7:
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

This is actually the opposite usage -- a reason not to criticize, for you are a hypocrite, since you have yourself done something wrong.

To contrast the two: In splinter from teeth to beam between eyes, there is an escalation in both item (a small splinter to a huge beam) and location (in an eye would hurt more than between teeth). Alternatively, in both cases it is the eye, and we are only escalating the item found therein.

Lectio difficilior, choosing the more difficult word as original, would seem to argue for choosing "eyes" rather than "teeth." But the pattern of duplication would argue in the other way. What about the quote from Matthew? This would seem to match the version of the gemara that has "eye" with both. And what will you otherwise say? That twice (in both Matthew and the gemara), there was an independent shift to "eye?" It is far easier to say that the text was originally "eye," and there was a shift because of "splinter" towards "teeth."

Another possibility: there were variants of the saying, that of Matthew with mote (=speck of dust) to beam, both in the eye, and that of the gemara, with a splinter in the teeth to a beam in the eye. Because all these things are bad things encountered.

In Matthew, they kept the focus on the location of the problem, thus both were in the eye, and so they chose something fit to be found in the eye - a mote. In the gemara, they focused on the item stuck in, and so contrasted a splinter -- which would be found in the teeth, to the proverbial mote in the eye. So the two proverbs have parallel but distinct genesis from smaller parts. Then, in the gemara, the teeth become the eyes, not merely because of duplication, but rather from knowledge of some copyist of the verses in Matthew.

{Update, 2008: But then, I should have checked the variant translations of Matthew more carefully. Some render it kisam, and splinter, as opposed to mote.}