Hello Josh:

Strain at does not mean the same thing as strain out, and in all the discussion nobody has even said that it does, except for the strained speculation that it means trying to strain out a gnat without necessarily succeeding at the effort. The proverbial understanding of "strain at a gnat" is that it's about exerting oneself over trifles, it does not include the idea of filtering out impurities.

NONE of the quotes given include the idea of filtering, not Matthew Henry, not John Gill, not any of them. Theirs is the proverbial understanding which is a different idea than the idea of filtering out gnats, although it maintains a similar enough meaning concerning excessive attention to small things to be useful as a proverb nevertheless.

The Pharisees even today filter their liquid food JUST IN CASE there might be an unclean bug in it -- they do NOT have to see this bug, it's simply a worry that one MIGHT be there that they can't see. This is typical Pharisaical obsessing over minutiae, and I happen to know this from an orthodox Jewish correspondent of mine. I've known this for a long time but never applied it to the question of the KJB translation until now.

Strain AT does NOT mean the same thing as strain OUT, but apparently Dr. Waite wants the original meaning to be implied nevertheless, despite the fact that we've used the phrase for centuries to mean exerting and not filtering.