2/189 — "Entering houses from their backs"
"…Goodness is not that you enter houses from their backs. Goodness is to guard oneself. So enter houses by their doors."
The pattern لَيْسَ ٱلْبِرُّ comes for the second time after verse 177. There it was said that goodness is not the turning of a direction; here the same is said of another practice.
According to what is transmitted, not entering houses by the door while in a state of ritual consecration, and opening a hole at the back instead, was a practice left from the age of ignorance and was counted piety. The verse lifts it and gives its ground: goodness is not making things hard.
The sentence that follows has become a principle: وَأْتُوا۟ ٱلْبُيُوتَ مِنْ أَبْوَٰبِهَا — "enter houses by their doors". Its wording corrects a practice, but its idiomatic sense in Arabic is wider: to enter a matter by its proper way, from its right place.