Rabbinic Parables and the Parables of Jesus (Notley and Safrai)
The historical Jesus was a pious first-century Jew who led a renewal movement within Judaism and who debated with other first-century Jews how best to follow God, determine God’s will, and observe God’s Law. Attempting to reconstruct the larger first-century contexts in which Jesus’ parables were created, spoken, and heard is an indispensable element of interpreting the parables of this first-century Jewish teacher, one that can help prevent domesticating Jesus’ parables or interpreting them in an anti-Jewish manner. One should not—and does not have to—denigrate Judaism to emphasize positive elements in Jesus’ teachings. Some of those teachings are distinctive to Jesus, but all of those teachings are Jewish to their core.
A significant step toward reading Jesus' parables in their Jewish context occurred in 2011, when R. Steven Notley and Ze’ev Safrai published an annotated collection of narrative parables from the earliest stratum of Rabbinic Judaism. The book includes over 400 parables, each interpreted briefly, and it draw conclusions from the entire collection.
Since the meaning of mashal in late antiquity was evolving, Notley and Safrai refrain from attempting to define it (a definition of parable always loses almost as much as it gains for our understanding). Instead they list several distinguishing characteristics of a mashal, which they envision as a “form of metaphor” that tends to have some or all of the following elements: (1) the narrative explicitly defines itself as a mashal; (2) the story’s purpose is to teach a moral (included in a nimshal); (3) the story lacks identifying details, such as where the story took place; (4) the parable describes a “reality,” but it generally concerns a general type of person (e.g., a king, woman, sick person, etc.); (5) it does not contain divine visions; (6) the moral of the story is overt and explicitly explained; (7) the parable is always told in Hebrew (Notley and Safrai thus argue--which is doubtful--that Jesus originally spoke his parables in Hebrew). The more of these seven characteristics a story has, the more likely it is a mashal.
Notley and Safrai demonstrate that parables were almost never used in halakah (legal material) and almost exclusively appear in interpretation of scripture. Jewish sages primarily considered parables to be a pedagogical instrument; in places they claim that it is impossible to understand the words or details of the Torah without the parable explaining them (32–33; as Midrash Song of Songs Rabbah I.1,8 indicates). These parables function to illustrate, reinforce, and emphasize—and sometimes exaggerate (e.g., the “king parables”)—a message. Thus they are inextricably related to the sermons preached by the sages and most likely used by Jesus in his public sermons, although one difference between the parables of the later Jewish sages and Jesus is that Jesus’ parables “are at the center of his sermon, and in effect are the sermon itself.”
Notley and Safrai also note some key differences between rabbinic parables and the parables of Jesus: Jesus’ parables usually are about ordinary people and rural culture, usually stand on their own, and sometimes contain no application/nimshal or reference to Scripture.
The next post reflects further on reading Jesus' parables in their Jewish contexts.
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