The gospel parables appear to be the mark of a new genre of literature in the Aramaic- and Greek-speaking Near East. It’s not entirely true, see more on this below.
They bring four aspects of life to the hearer’s attention: One, the hidden nature of life, especially in its most commonly accepted aspects. Secondly, its irrevocable dynamism and its urgency (the parables are almost all about urgency: this has often been seen as part of the apocalyptic slant of Jesus and the gospels, but it is wider than this). Thirdly, the event encapsulated in a parable, however small, leads to a definition or re-definition of human relations and justice. Finally, all parables raise the possibility of radical change and reparation.
But first, what constitutes a parable? Is it identifiable by its shape? It would have a distinctive opener, for instance, or a chiastic structure, without firm conclusion, and would be in need of explanation? How would it be different from a simile or an allegory? Does one think immediately of a didactic point, a moral point? But what do we mean by “moral?” A lesson obvious to all, easy to point to and to remember and transmit to others? But then, why speak in parables?
Secondly, is it “self-determined” text, or is it intended? that is, an authorial voice or intention underlies the text.
A short history of the genre
Fables have along history:
- for instance contest fables in Sumerian and Akkadian, as in the the debate between the Date Palm and the Tamarisk: (unknown no. of lines missing)
Lines 1-10 The Tamarisk opened his mouth and spoke. He addressed the Date Palm: “My body …. the bodies of the gods. (The reference is to statues of tamarisk wood.) You grow your fruits but someone places them before me like a maid approaching her mistress. You do not provide the measuring vessels. You are …. minor crops, but I …. Your attendants …. before me for you.”
Lines 11–19 In his anger the Date Palm answered him. He addressed his brother the Tamarisk: “You say: ‘If people build daises for me and beautify them too, they certainly do not swear by the gods before clay (?).’ — You may be the body of the gods in their shrines and people may name with a good name the daises of the gods, but it is silver that can pride itself as the overlay of the gods. …., describe your beauty!”
- There are fables in Hebrew Bible: Judges 9.8-15 (Yotham); 2 Kings 14.9-10.
- Parables using humans: there is a small number in the Hebrew Bible, which could all be seen as blame stories (blame mashals), used as legal stratagems:
- Prophet Nathan and David, 2 Sam 12.1-14
- the woman of Tekoah, 2 Sam 14.1-20
- 1 Kgs 20.35-43
- Isaiah 5.1-7 (see 27.2-6), the song of the vineyard (involving humans and plants): see below.
- The fact that there are a few parables in the Hebrew Bible as well as in post-biblical Jewish literature means that the form was not borrowed from Hellenistic literature in Palestinian literature. Neither did Jesus invent the form, which would have been borrowed later by the rabbis. Indeed, D. Stern suggests that the small number of texts in this form in the Hebrew Bible and in early post-biblical Jewish literature might be due to “the social status of the literary form” (see D. Stern, Parables in Midrash, p. 187.). It was perhaps despised by a sophisticated scribal tradition writing for narrow audience. In fact, the popularity of the parable or mashal and the social status of its practitioners: popular preachers, may have led to its being discounted by scribes, though one would expect to see traces of this putative contempt or rift.
The parables attributed to Jesus, then, would be the first extensive, abundant, and socially significant, evidence of a phenomenon that would be quite accepted as a literary form later in Talmudic literature, especially in the Midrashim.
Gospel parables
A list (among many possible lists. Note that it is possible to construct a
list on the basis of formal characteristics. See Via et al, as well as Propp):
1. the Sower: Mk 4.38, 13–20 // Mt 13.3–8a
2. the unforgiving slave: Mt 18.23–35
3. the workers in the vineyard: Mt 20.1–16
4. the lost sheep; lost coin; lost son (Mt / Lk)
5. the good Samaritan: Lk 10.25–37
6. the rich fool: Lk 12.16–21 and Thomas 63
7. the rich man and Lazarus: Lk 16.19–31
8. “parables of wisdom”
9. the unjust manager: Lk 16.1–8
10. faithful servant: Mt 24.45–51
11. the ten maidens: Mt 25.1–13;
12. cf. waiting slaves, Mk 13..34–37 and Lk 1.35–38
13. the two sons (Mt 21.28–32)
14. the friend at midnight (Lk 11.5–8)
15. the unjust judge (Lk 18.2–8)
16. the father’s good gifts (Mt 7.9–11 // Lk 11.11–13)
17. the barren fig–tree (Lk 13.69); other stories of fig-trees;
18. the slave at duty (Lk 17.7–10)
19. the talents (Mt 25.14–30);
20. the pounds (Lk 19.12–27)
21. the weeds in the wheat (Mt 13.24–30, 36–43, Thomas 57);
22. the dragnet (Mt 13.47–50)
23. final judgment (Mt 25.31–46)
24. the great banquet (Lk 14.16–24);
25. the wedding feast (Mt 22.1–14)
26. the wicked tenants (Mk 12.1–12; Mt 21.33–46 // Lk 20.9–19; Thomas 65–66)
27. Parables of the kingdom: growth
28. joy of finding…
The sower, Luke 8.4–8
Why does Jesus speak in parables? To be deliberately confusing? Ex. of Mk 4.1–9 // Mt 13.1–9 // Lk 8.4–8. We move backwards in a “night of time” towards a beginning, to moments of illumination lived at the dawn of language, to a well of being. The nature of life is hidden and tamed from the earliest moment by well-learned images and phrases. Parables are first of all a revelation of life as an gift made with some urgency and that claimed our attention and our response. The image of the sower is at the beginning of parables. I take this to be a serious invitation to consider these initial words in the light of our own lived “dawn of language” as we remember it.
Structure: Jesus is teaching by the sea of Galilee. Note the basic elements: sea, seed, soil, and rock. A great crowd gathers. Luke has no sea of Galilee, no climbing on a boat. The structure of the story in Luke goes something like this:
> The sower went out to sow. It happened that the seed fell:
(1) on (by) the path.
was trampled
birds ate it
(2) on the rock
grows
dries up
(3) in the middle of thorns
grows together
asphyxiated
(4) in good soil
grew
made fruit (x 100)
Still 3 negative soils and a positive one, but with pairs of verbs for each stage.
The interpreter’s goal is to transcend the historical, philological, and theological approaches and take seriously the recent developments in the study of language (Saussure? Jakobson? Austin?). See A.N. Wilder, “Telling from depth to depth: the parable of the sower,” ch. 3 of his Jesus’ Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), pp. 89–100.
First of all: How does it echo, what response does it evoke in us (?), in “the original listener,”or ‘reader,” since it becomes text early on and was framed within a particular frame of reference (though this frame would not be necessarily precise, since it is the function of language, esp. poetic language, to construct the frame of reference while giving new power to language).
The parable, according to Wilder, addresses two “deep sounding boards:” first, the relationship of human beings to the earth, but a mediated one, involving tilling, planting, the mystery of “tricking” nature, and its willingness to respond. Two, the effort of human beings to go out of themselves, to take a risk and yet trust there will be a response. How deeply?
At this imaginary level, it would be detrimental to allegorize. There is no need to think of the sower as being the divinity (God: what does this mean?), the “King.” The sower going out and meeting with four types of soil (one being not a soil exactly, the other a pretend-soil, the third a soil with the requisite depth). The parable tells about something deeply felt but differently expressed. The anguish of risking all (sowing is risk-taking; agriculture everywhere, and especially in dry-farming zones, is about trying to reduce risk, by using different crops, staggering, changing plots or exchanging them, etc., and distributing the yield widely), the risking failure is an effort, a conatus, as Wilder says.
It is noteworthy that in the use of the “sowing grain” metaphor, no weeding or hoeing can happen once the field has been sown. The essential work is done, it is hoped that the rains will come in time, and diseases and pests won’t attack the crop.
One just has to wait for the results (a long season). The crop is seen as bounty, miracle, grace. It is perhaps because there has been that period of waiting and worrying, without direct care and in the impossibility of changing the fateful sowing and field?
The mystery of this story is the absence of a middle point, an average yield. The reality of farming was of low averages, precisely because of birds, disease, lack of soil, weed competition. Yet Jesus and successors tap into a basic ground here: the hope, which drives the peasant (anyone) to see plenitude when things work “right,” and celebrate it. Perhaps this is less true of our times of plenty, when we have become experts at seeing rarity everywhere, beginning with our economics textbooks, because enough of us (with power) are in a world of plenty.
The extraordinarily fruitful response (to history? can one conflate the individual and the society at this point, because surely all ancient thinking was organically centered around the group’s needs) takes time. Sowing itself must be done at a certain time in the year, and there is an urgency to it as there is to harvesting and all other possibilities. Growth itself, up to fruitfulness, is long delayed, a theme often taken up in other parables of growth and frustration (see e.g. the story of the fig-tree). In this parable too, the fruitfulness is not only a matter of depth of soil or hearing, it is a matter of patience.
The bird doesn’t sow or “harvest” but just picks as it goes from the path. Agriculture, and so risk and worry, are absent. More on the path: it is trampled, and would be set away from the good soil. There is no process at this point, but also little seed having this fate.
The rocky part of the field—rock ledges on terraced fields all through Palestine—is the area with a little soil, so there is the beginning of germination (and a hope on the part of this uncalculating sower), it takes some time for the grain to germinate, grow, and die. In this respect, one has here more of a loss than before with the birds, because there was some hope of a yield, and it is likely to be a more common situation.
The third type of soil is deep but “thorns” (of several kinds in Palestine, and quite common, as all of agriculture is a struggle with weeds) grow also and take advantage of the richness of the cultivated soil. The thorns and weeds grow together with the good grain and cannot be removed easily. It takes time, right up to the harvest, to realize one gets only “thorns” rather than grain or fruit.
The fourth kind of soil is just right, like the brick house in the story of the three little pigs or the food in the story of the three little bears. The farmer or sower has done his best to ensure its receptivity to the seed. When it gives fruit, it will be in time, and the labor, worry, and long wait will be forgotten while hope will be transformed into joy. An exaggerated joy? Or just the feeling that the abundance of nature is to be celebrated. The sower’s work and inherent risk-taking are forgotten, or rather take their proper place as a service of preparation. The harvest is a miracle. In the seed proper, there is the miracle of something dry that will “fall” and “die” to become another plant that feeds many.
The preceding remarks are based on paying close attention to the concrete situation of the sower: the time factor, the risk and hope versus the plenitude of the harvest, the lack of “average” or middle way when it comes to fruiting.
Allegorizations are possible. Narrowly conceived, i.e. term to term, it is possible to equate the sower with the divinity, the seed with the “word” or Torah, the first soil or path as those too brutish to understand, and the birds as Satan, the second soil as the enthusiasts, the third soil as the worriers and busy bodies, etc., as the gospel does already. Another possibility is to allegorize as previously done the notions of sower, seed, soil, but adding the implicit ideas of risk, time, plenitude, and lack of a middle position or average. The allegory in this case is more open and deals with more dynamic quantities. The parable could be widened to a view of history—assumed by a culture steeped into the Torah, its Exodus story, especially the Deuteronomy and the Prophets—in which the seed or ferment is the word indeed, that is to say, the revelation that has been kept, treasured, sifted and refined (filtered), repeated, and then cast, repeatedly throughout history, and orientates or vectorizes everything. One can’t but respond. The more urgent responses are not necessarily the more fruitful.
[I have to translate this] Toujours à propos du semeur et en continuant à allégoriser: la métaphore de la semence exprime l’idée que la parole constitue l’audience dans l’acte de l’écoute. Là où il n’y a que passage, préoccupations, soucis de mille ordres, il peut aussi y avoir attention, écoute qui peut devenir profonde et donner naissance à une grande générosité. Mais il n’y a pas de milieu. La semence ou se perd ou fructifie. Une fois “mise en terre,” elle ne peut être “capitalisée” ou “mise en réserve.” Ceci est proposé comme métaphore pour toute parole ou tout geste humain, pour la Torah, inspirée de Dieu.
The sower goes out to sow grain. The preparation of the seed and even of the soil is bracketed out, or assumed. Worrying about having enough and a seed of good quality, plowing and composting, weeding, hoeing, for a hoped for harvest, for an eventual return, full and joyous. Home, the room at home is the goal of the voyage. Sowing is an emptying, a casting out of something precious that has been saved (perhaps in spite of hunger), it is a risk, a fateful gesture. On the horizon, there may be the Yizreel of Scripture, not the plain itself, but the stories in which God is the sower of life.
The word for sower is masculine in Aramaic and Greek (a male activity), whereas the earth or soil is feminine. But it is a complex soil, whose complexity is beyond gender, comprising a path, rocks, weeds. The grain falls, though note that grain is never mentioned: Anything can happen. It is the virtue or miracle of grain that, given a little soil and humidity, it will grow, no matter what.
