What Are They Saying about the Parables?: Jewish Contexts (Chapter 5, Part 5): Rabbinic Parables and the Parables of Jesus (David Stern)

 Rabbinic Parables and the Parables of Jesus:

David Stern

David Stern provides a more sophisticated methodological approach to midrashic rabbinic parables. Stern gathers data to suggest that the rabbis initially used parables in a variety of contexts—including recitations at banquets, as responses to polemical questions and challenges, or a means of expression during a time of public crisis. The most common uses, however, were the delivery of sermons in the synagogues and the study of the Torah in the academy. In fact, the rabbis became convinced that the parable form itself was created for this latter usage. 

Stern argues that the mashal is “an allusive narrative told for an ulterior purpose,” whose purpose can usually be defined as praise or blame of a specific situation of the author and audience of this fictional narrative. 

In other words, the mashal draws a series of parallels between the story recounted in the narrative and the “actual situation” to which the mashal is directed. These parallels, however, are not drawn explicitly; the audience is left to derive them for themselves. So the mashal is not a simple tale with a transparent lesson nor a completely opaque story with a secret message; the mashal is a narrative that actively elicits from its audience the application of its message (i.e., the interpretation). 

The social context, then, clarifies the “message” of the mashal by giving the audience all the information they need. Here Stern’s approach encounters several problems: First, most meshalim in rabbinic literature are preserved not in narrative contexts, but exegetical ones (i.e., in the study of scripture), and there seems to be no important formal or functional differences between meshalim embedded in other narratives and those presented in exegetical contexts (1991:7); in both, the rabbis used them as rhetorical devices. In fact, once the mashal was embedded into any literary context, Stern admits, the “real context” was no longer immediately present or available. In an attempt to clarify “the original context” (1986:637), the nimshal was provided. In a later work Stern clarifies his position concerning the “original context” by stating that the nimshal provides the “secondhand audience” with the necessary information it needs to understand the mashal’s message (1989:45–48, 59, 72). At best, the narrative will present a secondhand account of what that “reality” was. As the context changes—in form and audience—a parable’s meaning will also change, and it will change even more when a parable’s medium is shifted from oral to literary (1991:17–18). 

Stern agrees that it is difficult to trace the “lineage” of parabolic narratives that have human characters in ancient Near Eastern literature. Yet parables and fables are very much at home in “traditional cultures” that still utilize oral traditions, as evidenced best, perhaps, by a literary form found in the ancient Greek epic: the ainos, a genre that includes fables and tales (1991:6). 

Stern also agrees that the parables of Jesus and rabbinic parables share a common background and compositional similarities: Jesus’ parables are the earliest datable evidence “for the tradition of the mashal that attains its full maturity in Rabbinic literature” (1989:43), where the mashal assumed its “normative, standard form” (1991:7). Because the rabbinic parables are the closest evidence for the literary form of parable as Jesus may have used it, they offer valuable, unique evidence for how a common literary tradition has been directed to different ends. 

In their present literary forms as ideological narratives, parables are constructed by design and rhetoric to impress a certain world view on their audiences. Stern attempts to ascertain how these ideological narratives perform that function. He argues that through the refusal to state its message directly, the mashal actually becomes more effective in persuading the audience of its essential truth: It deliberately gives the impression of naming its meaning “insufficiently” (1991:15). Thus the mashal artfully manipulates its audience to become actively involved to “deduce” meaning from the two “enactments” of that message (i.e., the mashal and the nimshal). 

To sum up, Stern concludes that the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels used parable in essentially the same way as the rabbis employed the mashal—in public contexts (e.g., preaching) and as an instrument for praise and blame, often directed at persons present in his audience. Jesus’ parables, like the rabbis’ parables, were exoteric—their messages could have been comprehended by their original audiences without much difficulty (pace Mark 4:11–12). 

In WATSA Parables? I include some caveats about Stern's conclusions, as well as many other details about his approach and conclusions, but overall his works significantly increase our insight into the methodological, ideological, and historical problems involved in parable study, as well as our understanding of the rabbinic parables themselves. 

Next up, the R. Steven Notley and Ze’ev Safrai 2011 annotated collection of narrative parables from the earliest stratum of Rabbinic Judaism.