This article examines the representation of children as agents in selected New Testament and early rabbinic parables, and the potential theological meaning facilitated by these representations.1 It is based on the sociological concept of agency, a concept that can be paraphrased in terms of someone’s capacity to act purposefully and to make a difference within social networks and in structures of power.2 Focussing on children’s agency, this study draws attention to the ways parables construct the active role of children in the context of parent-child relationships in their narratives. These stories about parents and children are typically used to shed light on the God-human relationship. The question of children’s agency therefore directly touches on theological questions, in particular debates concerning divine providence, omnipotence, and the role of the human free will. Given that, from a conceptual blending perspective, a parable’s narrative and its application exert mutual influence on each other,3 both the narrative representation of children’s agency and its theological function in the application will be addressed.
New Testament and rabbinic parables draw on a common pool of early Jewish narrative themes and motifs, share many formal characteristics, and are often also closely related theologically.4 The representation of the God-human relationship in terms of a parent-child relationship is one such common characteristic. Yet this metaphorical representation has also been one of the areas in which anti-Jewish stereotypes in New Testament scholarship and Christian theology continue to abound to this very day. For instance, in the interpretation history of Luke’s parable of the Father and His Two Sons (Luke 15:11–32), commonly known as the parable of the Prodigal Son, Christian exegetes often contrasted their perception of God as a loving, merciful, and forgiving father with the supposedly demanding, stern, and punishing God of Judaism. The younger son is positively interpreted as an image of the followers of Jesus, be it Jewish “tax collectors and sinners,” or gentile Christians, who are graciously welcomed (back) by God, while the elder son is negatively seen as a representation of the (Pharisaic) Jews who are believed to be serving God slavishly out of duty rather than love, mistakenly thinking that God’s grace must be earned and resenting God’s graceful outreach, which is believed to be unique to the Jesus movement and early Christianity.5 Focussing on children’s agency and the representations of the father in selected New Testament and early rabbinic parables, this article intends to replace such anti-Jewish stereotypes in parable research with unprejudiced comparisons.
With the concept of agency, we bring scholarship on New Testament and rabbinic parables in conversation with the emergent field of childhood research in the New Testament and ancient Judaism. Agency as an analytical tool has found wide acceptance in various disciplines, including, most recently, the study of children and childhood in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, rabbinic studies, and ancient history. However, while numerous studies in parable scholarship have examined parables with children, they hardly take such theoretical developments in the field of childhood research into account. Childhood scholarship, in turn, has only devoted limited attention to synoptic and rabbinic parables; the parable of the Children at the Market (Matt 11:16–19//Luke 7:31–35) is a notable exception.6 It is only recently that Albertina Oegema, in her PhD dissertation “Negotiating Paternal Authority and Filial Agency: Fathers and Sons in Early Rabbinic Parables” (2021), brought the two fields of study into conversation. Reading father-son relationships in early rabbinic parables from a children’s perspective, she demonstrates, among others, how the concept of agency brings the mutual interactions between fathers and sons—and, indirectly, between God and Israel—into sharper relief.7
Building on this dissertation, the present article aims to contribute to the scholarly conversation between the two fields and examine the representation and theological function of children’s agency in New Testament and rabbinic parables from a comparative perspective. In order to facilitate the scholarly exchange, we will first sketch the state of scholarship on children in the New Testament and ancient Judaism (1). Then we will introduce the concept of agency and our approach to it (2). Subsequently, we will discuss the representation of filial agency in four New Testament and early rabbinic parables (3–4) and evaluate this representation from a theological perspective (5). Central to our study are the parables of the Food-Requesting Son (Luke 11:11–13) and the Father and His Two Sons (Luke 15:11–32) on the New Testament side, and the parables of the Starving Children and Slaves (Sifre Deut. 40) and the King and His Unfaithful Daughter (Mekh. Deut. 1:11) on the rabbinic side.8 Although the ages of the portrayed sons and daughters are left unclear, all these parables revolve around children who are still part of their father’s household, are on the verge of leaving it, or are returning to it.
1 The Study of Children in the New Testament and Ancient Judaism
The history of research on children and childhood in the New Testament and early Christianity can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s. Several exegetically and theologically oriented studies discussed the role of children in Jesus’s preaching in the Gospels.9 The field of research was definitively established with the work of Peter Müller, William Strange, and Bettina Eltrop in the 1990s.10 Their contributions were stimulated by a growing attention to children and children’s needs in church and society, and, in the wake of Philippe Ariès’s influential monograph L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime (1960), contributed to the development of historical childhood research as an academic discipline.11 With a central focus on Jesus’s blessing and welcoming of the children (Mark 9:33–37 par.; 10:13–16 par.), Müller, Strange, and Eltrop emphasized Jesus’s positive attitude towards and valuation of children within the comparative framework of his Graeco-Roman and Jewish cultural contexts. Yet they also pointed to androcentric and patriarchal tendencies in the New Testament Gospels and the earliest Christian communities.
From the 2000s onwards, the study of children in the New Testament became more prolific. Scholars started to explore new sources and methodologies, as a result of which their studies became increasingly specialized.12 One influential study is Cornelia B. Horn and John W. Martens’s “Let the Little Children Come to Me” (2009).13 Taking into account the Graeco-Roman and Jewish socio-historical contexts as well as the heterogeneity among children, they attempted to assess the difference Christianity made in children’s lives in antiquity. Another leading scholar is Sharon Betsworth, who combined sociohistorical and literary approaches in her examination of children in the canonical and apocryphal Gospels. She argues that these overlooked characters play a significant role in the Gospels’ narratives, with each gospel adding its own emphasis.14 Most recently, Amy Lindeman Allen, who makes use of a “childist approach” (see below), placed great emphasis on the inclusion, participation, and power of children in the Gospel of Luke and its audience.15
This diversification of methodologies and source material calls for scholarly integration. After predecessors in the 2000s,16 recently two handbooks on children in the Bible and the biblical world have been published, bringing together various leading scholars, methodological approaches, and sub-disciplines. In the T&T Clark Handbook of Children in the Bible and the Biblical World (2019), edited by Sharon Betsworth and Julie Faith Parker, childist biblical interpretation is established as a method for focussing on the agency and action of children and for reassessing their role and impact in biblical (incl. apocryphal) texts.17 It builds upon the child-centred and childist interpretations introduced by Hebrew Bible scholars in the early 2010s.18 In Children and Methods (2020), edited by Katherine Henriksen Garroway and John W. Martens, the literary and socio-historical approaches of childist biblical interpretation are supplemented with new methodologies.19 Their “childist criticism” aims to give children in literary, epigraphic, and material sources agency and a voice, fill in the gaps in these sources, change the focus from adult-centric to child-centric, and explore the interplay between a child’s value and vulnerability in a society.20
Compared with New Testament childhood scholarship, the study of Jewish children in antiquity is still in its infancy. The first substantial exploration of Jewish childhood in late antiquity can be traced back to Leopold Löw’s Die Lebensalter in der jüdischen Literatur (1875).21 His study was followed by several other publications on Jewish childhood, the most seminal and “encyclopaedic” of which was William Feldman’s The Jewish Child: Its History, Folklore, Biology, and Sociology (1917).22 After Feldman’s monograph, it was not until the mid-1970s that new publications on Jewish childhood started appearing, with distinct historical, literary, and halakhic foci. This renewed interest was stimulated by the psychological and medical study of children, social changes regarding the Jewish family in Western society, and the scholarly development of family history as a field of study. As in New Testament scholarship, Ariès’s L’enfant et la vie familiale exerted much influence. Still, during this phase, the study of Jewish childhood in late antiquity remained limited and fragmentary; the resulting publications were spread across different disciplines and had distinct historical, literary, and halakhic foci. Most ground-breaking was Shaye Cohen’s collected volume The Jewish Family in Antiquity (1993), which includes three articles devoted to Jewish parent-child relations.23 These articles point to the similarity between Jewish and non-Jewish family relations and emphasize their social, economic, and freeborn/slave varieties.
Since the 2010s, there has been a continuing scholarly interest in the Jewish family and Jewish childhood in late antiquity. The greatest theoretical and methodological advancement was brought about by the publication of Hagith Sivan’s monograph Jewish Childhood in the Roman World (2018).24 Sivan examines rabbinic constructions of Jewish childhood, analyzes the imagery and epigraphy relating to children in late ancient synagogues, and includes four fictive autobiographies of Jewish children living in various places around the ancient Mediterranean.25 With this creative form of narrative historiography (“faction”), Sivan offers an innovative method for imagining the experiences of children from their own perspective. This turn to the children’s own perspective is further accentuated in Oegema’s aforementioned study, in which she employs the perspectives of agency, masculinity, and emotion to examine the diverse ways sons and their fathers interact with each other.26
2 Agency
Building on Oegema’s examination,27 the present article aims to further the conversation between scholarship on New Testament and rabbinic parables and to contribute to the study of childhood in the New Testament and ancient Judaism. As indicated above, both childist interpretation and childist criticism focus on the agency and action of children. Yet the contributors to the recent T&T Clark Handbook of Children in the Bible and the Biblical World and Children and Methods fail to reflect on the notion of agency itself. They rather employ it as a synonym for a child’s capacity to act. This is a missed opportunity, since scholarly reflections on agency in other disciplines enable one not to just describe what children do, but also to explain why they do what they do—in interdependence and interaction with the social structures of their environment—and how their deeds influence these social structures. The present article aims to refine and apply the concept of agency to parables featuring children and fathers so as to contribute to the theoretical foundations of childist criticism and evaluate the theological potential of this analytic tool in parable research.
What, then, is agency? For the present purposes, we focus on two important elements in the conceptualization of agency. First, scholarly definitions of agency, such as those of the sociologists Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, make clear that agency does not just consist in an individual’s capacity to act, but always refers to the interplay between this individual’s capacity to act and the social structures in his/her environment, in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. The power of ingrained habits, but also the ability to imagine future trajectories of action and to make practical and normative judgments among them, are constitutive components of agency.28 The central importance of this interplay has led researchers of modern childhood to emphasize the active role of children in their growing and learning processes and in the way they cope with social, cultural, legal, physical, and economic structures.29 Ancient historians, in turn, employ the notion of agency to let the children’s “tiny voices” be heard and to unravel something of the richness of everyday childhood culture.30
A second important aspect is the multiplicity of agentival forms. Someone’s agency can be both directed at reproducing the social structures in his/her environment and at acting contrary to them or even transforming them. It affirms the point made by scholars studying women’s agency in gender-traditional religions that agency should not be equated with resistance and subversion alone. Next to “resistance agency” (the ways religious women resist, challenge, or change some aspects of the male-dominated structures of their religion), they point to “empowerment agency” (how women participate in and reinterpret religious doctrines and practices in ways that make them feel empowered in daily life), “instrumental agency” (how women participate in religious practices for advantages in non-religious aspects of their lives), and “compliance agency” (the manifold and diverse ways in which women conform to gender-traditional religions) as other forms of agency.31 Thus, agency can be exhibited in a broad spectrum from compliance to empowerment to resistance.
In our analysis of New Testament and early rabbinic parables, we focus on the diverse interplay between a child’s agency and the social structure of its father’s authority. Our examination is based on our definition of agency:
The agency of a child consists of the diverse modalities of action, speech, thought, and emotion by which a child interacts with his/her father given the opportunities and confines imposed and presented by the father’s exercise of authority.
While its reference to action, speech, thought, and emotion accounts for the diverse ways in which agency can be exhibited in parables, the general reference to interaction with the father covers the interplay between a child’s agency and the social structures in its environment. The definition enables us to analyze how the agency of children, according to these parables, is shaped by and gives shape to their father’s exercise of authority.
In the next two sections, these two aspects of children’s agency will be examined in more detail. First, we focus on the agentival space opened up by the father within the framework of his exercise of authority. The parables of the Food-Requesting Son (Luke 11:11–13) and of the Starving Children and Slaves (Sifre Deut. 40), which consist of two different realizations of the theme of child provision, shed light on the way children’s agency is defined by their father’s exercise of authority. Thereafter, we turn to the diverse modalities of filial agency, and the way they interact with and exercise influence on paternal authority. In this section, the parables of the Father and His Two Sons (Luke 15:11–32) and of the King and His Unfaithful Daughter (Mekh. Deut. 1:11) will be at the centre of our analysis. While these sections focus mainly upon the role of children’s agency in the parables’ narratives, the theological import of the parent-child dynamics will be addressed from a comparative perspective in the concluding section of this article.
3 The Agency of Children in the Context of Their Father’s Exercise of Authority: Luke 11:11–13 and Sifre Deut. 40
Luke’s parable of the Food-Requesting Son is part of a larger context in which Jesus gives instructions to his disciples about supplication (Luke 11:1–13). He teaches them a daily prayer, a short version of the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2–4), and, with the parable of the Friend at Midnight, he encourages them to pray without fear of rejection (Luke 11:5–8). With a triple logion about asking/receiving, searching/finding, and knocking/being opened, the latter point is underscored (Luke 11:9–10). The climax of the section is formed by a short parable phrased as a question (Luke 11:11–13):
In comparison with the parable’s version in Q, as deduced from Matthew’s version of the parable (Matt 7:9–11),32 Luke’s version exhibits several redactional changes.33 While Q speaks of a person (
Our parable assumes this encompassing authority of the father, but emphasizes the everyday experience that children’s requests for food are rarely answered in a cruel or harmful manner. The theological interpretation of the parable in Luke 11:13 goes one step further and assumes that the addressees, as a rule, give their children “good gifts,” that is, generally answer their requests for food in a positive fashion. The everyday experience that human beings, despite their deeply anchored potential for evil, regularly do good to their children enables the a malo ad bonum conclusion that God, who is in essence good (cf. Mark 10:18//Luke 18:19), certainly does not cut himself off from the requests of human beings.
The son’s agentival space is clearly defined by the restrictive, potentially lethal right of the father to withhold food or serve harmful goods to his son. The son’s agency is limited to the utterance of a request, with which the son indirectly honours his father’s undisputed position of authority. In the application, God’s power to give or withhold material and non-material goods is acknowledged in the requests of the people as well. At the same time, the anticipated positive reaction of God encourages the listeners to submit such requests and to make full use of their limited agentival space.37
In the rabbinic parable of Sifre Deut. 40, the agency of children is likewise defined by the restrictive authority of the father in the context of child provision. The parable is part of a midrash on Deut 11:11–12: “And the land which you cross over to inherit is … a land which YHWH your God cares about; the eyes of YHWH your God are always on it from the beginning of the year until the end of the year.” After a preceding midrash which demonstrates that God not only cares about the land but may also curse it, the parable is introduced:
The parable’s narrative describes how a king has the absolute authority over the sustenance for his many children and slaves. He is the one who has the keys of the storehouse in his hand. When the king’s children and slaves do his will, he opens the storehouse so that they eat and are satisfied. When they do not do his will, he closes the storehouse so that they starve to death. In the application, the king represents God, the children and slaves Israel, and the storehouse the heavens and the provision of rain. On the basis of two prooftexts (Deut 11:17 and Deut 28:12), it is argued that God rewards Israel’s obedience by opening up the heavenly storehouses, though he punishes them by failing to provide rain from heaven. Just like the children and slaves in the parable’s narrative, for Israel the provision or withholding of rain is a matter of life and death.
More than the parable of the Food-Requesting Son, the parable in Sifre Deut. 40 demonstrates how a father’s restrictive exercise of authority has potentially lethal consequences. Since the children will die when the king locks up his storehouse, they are presented as highly dependent on their father’s provision of food. Indeed, the authority of the king seems to be so encompassing that they are not described receiving food in alternative ways, such as begging (cf. m. Ketub. 13:3) or maintenance by the community (b. Ketub. 49ab). Transferred to the application, the king’s restrictive exercise of authority demonstrates how Israel, as the counterpart of the children and slaves, is highly dependent on God’s exercise of authority. If God shuts up the heavens and rain fails to appear, there are no alternative ways for Israel to obtain their food. Given the regular food shortages, famines, and endemic, long-term hunger and malnutrition in antiquity, the parable must have reminded its audience of their vulnerability and dependence on God’s provision of rain and food.40
Nevertheless, the parable still implies that the children and slaves have agency in a different area of life, viz. the way they behave vis-à-vis the king. The king cannot force them to obey his will, but can only motivate them to do so by means of reward and punishment. A similar agentival space is assumed in the parable’s application, since it is up to Israel to do God’s will and to keep his Torah. God cannot make them do this; he can only enhance their motivation with his rewards and punishments.
This discussion demonstrates that the parable in Sifre Deut. 40 elaborates the interaction between a father’s/God’s restrictive authority and the agency of the children/Jews in different theological directions than the parable of the Food-Requesting Son. Given that the parable of the Food-Requesting Son expresses implicit disapproval on fathers who fail to provide their children with edible food products, this raises questions about the rabbinic evaluation of the king’s withholding of food in the parable of Sifre Deuteronomy. Since the aforementioned rabbinic discussions about child maintenance make it clear that a father’s obligation to maintain his children was contested, the king’s actions may likewise have been contested. Some rabbis, such as those who plead in favour of a moral or legal obligation resting upon fathers to maintain their children, may have disapproved of the king’s withholding of food. Others may have valued the king’s rigorous punishment more positively, given that the disobedience of his children and slaves will have disgraced his honour, authority, and masculinity and will have threatened important cultural values as a result. This positive or negative evaluation of the king’s actions will have indirectly influenced the way God’s supplying or withholding of rain in the nimshal was valued.41
The parable may therefore have affinities with parables that express critiques and complaints of God. While scholarly discussions of this group of parables often focus on explicit formulations of these critiques in their narratives,42 the parable of the Starving Children and Slaves demonstrates that these critiques and complaints could also be expressed more indirectly. The king’s punishment in the form of death by starvation suits one of the narrative techniques that such complaint-parables employ: the king’s abusive exercise of power.43 This could be compared to some New Testament parables, which describe a master’s excessive use of violence on his slaves, such as the Matthean parables of a master and a king who harshly punish their disobedient slaves in Matt 24:45–51 (the slave is cut into pieces) and 25:14–30 (the slave who hid the talent is cast into the outer darkness). The reception history of the latter parable makes it clear that the third slave’s harsh punishment was regarded as unbearable, given that the apocryphal version of the parable in the Gospel of the Nazarenes (cited in Eusebius of Caesarea, Theophania, fragments IV, 22 [on Matt 25:14–15]) rewrites the story and indicates that the slave who hid the talent in the ground is only rebuked.44 The apocryphal variant of the story therefore forestalls an indirect critique of God, based on the readers’ negative evaluation of the king’s harsh punishment.
4 The Mutual Interdependence of Filial Agency and Paternal Authority: Luke 15:11–32 and Mekh. Deut. 1:11
The parable of Luke 15:11–32, commonly known as the parable of the Prodigal Son, offers a fascinating case for analysing the agency of adult sons in relation to their father. The younger son sets the plot in motion by asking his father to give him his share of the inheritance in advance, to which the latter obliges. While the son’s initiative itself passes without any judgment from the narrator, the way he deals with his inheritance is clearly given a negative assessment in the course of the narrative. The son turns everything into money, goes abroad, and squanders his property in “dissolute living” (15:13). He himself describes this in retrospect as “sinning against heaven and before you [i.e., the father]” (15:18, 21); the older brother for his part suspects that his brother “devoured” his father’s property “with whores” (15:30).
The parable thus describes a father who initially gives his son a maximum of agentival opportunities to shape his life in accordance with his own aims and wishes. Formally speaking, the father sets no limits to his agency. The son, in turn, exploits this agentival space by violating paternal and cultural norms and values. Through his own fault and due to external circumstances (the famine), he suddenly finds himself in a situation in which hardly any agentival space is left to him. As an impoverished immigrant, he has to accept the humiliating work as a swineherd, but even then he does not have enough to live on. He therefore decides to return home and ask his father to be allowed to work for him on his estate as a day labourer. In this position, he would be entitled to “bread for work,” the barest necessity of life. However, this desired new life, viewed soberly, will be a life on the margins of society, in social isolation, and in psychological misery. He would not really belong anywhere, neither among the “real” day labourers nor among his family, being despised by his fellow men because of his former way of life and social decline. Yet this life is the best of various alternative trajectories of action that the son sees placed in front of him.45
With his return, the son “forces” a reaction from his father, who will decide about his future fate. That is, within his limited agentival space, the son exerts influence on his father. How will the father react? He could refuse the son’s return to the family property and leave the homeless man to an uncertain fate. Alternatively, he could comply with his son’s request and condemn him to a shadowy existence in full view of the family’s life. He could also accept him as a “fallen son,” whose misconduct justifies accusations and poor treatment, creating a family constellation that would encourage the older son to despise his younger brother. However, the father does not do any of this. Instead, he ostentatiously reinstates the son who has returned home, in front of everyone, in the role of the beloved child: he runs towards him, hugs and kisses him, adorns him with festive clothing, a signet ring, and shoes, and organizes a joyous celebration with the fattened calf as festive meal. His course of action is motivated by his deep compassion (15:20:
When the older brother learns of his father’s actions, he reacts angrily and refuses to come into the house. By refusing to take part in the feast, the older son makes clear that he no longer wants to see himself as the “son of the house.” Since he does not recognize the son who returned home as his brother (“this one, your son”; 15:30), the father places the brotherly relationship at the centre of his argument (15:32: “your brother was dead and is alive again”). In his response, the older son, in retrospect and from his own perspective, describes the agentival space allotted to him by his father as extremely small. He uses the metaphor of a rule-abiding slave for himself: “See, for so many years I served you like a slave (
The younger son’s return works as a catalyst for change in this second father-son relationship. The older brother distances himself from his father’s actions and thus makes use of his right as a son to express his own opinion—which a slave could not have done without endangering his life and well-being. The father, whose masculinity is again threatened, now by the conspicuous absence of his older son, takes the first step towards reconciliation. He goes out to him, pleads with him instead of giving orders (15:28b), listens to him (15:29–30), and puts forward an alternative view of their relationship and of his younger brother’s fate (15:31–32). By asking his son to reassess both his view of his father and the behaviour appropriate to him as a son (i.e., sharing in his father’s property and joy about his younger brother’s return), the father honours his son’s freedom to decide for himself whether he wants to partake in his brother’s reintegration into the family. Again, the father’s exercise of authority seems to be geared towards the greatest possible autonomy for the son. The parable leaves open the question of the success or failure of the father’s reconciliation with his older son and of the older brother with his younger brother. Exactly here lies the appeal to the listeners. They have to recognize one another as equal brothers and sisters of their divine Father and learn that their Father is forgiving, expecting a childlike, not a servile relationship.
In the parable of the Unfaithful Daughter (Mekh. Deut. 1:11), the agency of a daughter functions as a catalyst for change in a father-daughter relationship as well. This parable aims to explain why Moses, in Deut 1:11, wishes for God’s thousandfold multiplication of Israel, given that he is also lamenting his inability to bear Israel (1:9) and their burden and strife (1:12). Why is a blessing needed at this point? The parable of the Unfaithful Daughter creates an imaginary series of events that fills in this narrative gap in Deut 1:11:
The parable revolves around a king who marries off his daughter and writes a large marriage contract for her. Despite his many warnings, the daughter violates accepted sexual norms and acts unfaithfully (
Just like the youngest son in the parable of the Prodigal Son, the daughter in this parable makes the most of her agentival opportunities. When the king writes a large marriage contract for her, his warnings do not seem to be very restrictive. He leaves his daughter with an agentival space in which she is able to disregard her father’s advice and violate accepted sexual norms. She could have acted like a proper virgin bride, but prefers to be sexually active—or, at the very least, to arouse this suspicion.49 Similarly, when the bride’s agent reproves her and brings her back, the parable makes clear that it depends on the girl whether or not she will turn around for the better. Only then do the reproofs of the bride’s agent fall on fertile ground. Like the youngest son, the girl acts autonomously from her father and her bride’s agent and pursues her own aims and desires instead.50
In view of the cultural value attached to a bride’s virginity at marriage, the daughter’s sexual affair (or sexually suspect behaviour) will have been regarded as disgraceful to her and suggestive of a bad moral character.51 Her behaviour must have infringed upon the honour of her prospective husband, and brought disgrace upon her father (cf. Sir 42:9–11).52 Specifically, since the daughter still falls under her father’s authority, her (actual or suspected) promiscuity will have expressed a disregard for the king’s exercise of authority over her. Given his failure to control his daughter’s conduct, his daughter’s exhibition of agency will have had a negative effect on the performance and perception of her father’s masculinity.53 It is therefore unsurprising that the bride’s agent attempts to bring about a change in her behaviour. Like the two sons in Luke’s parable of the Father and His Two Sons, the parable of the Unfaithful Daughter honours the freedom and autonomy of the girl to act according to her own aims and wishes.
Eventually, the king’s doubling of her marriage contract signals a restoration of family relations. The king accepts his daughter’s return into the family and proceeds with the marriage preparations, apparently assuming that the prospective husband and his family will go along with the change in his daughter’s behaviour as well. Transferred to the application, the daughter’s agentival space represents the freedom and autonomy God leaves to Israel to act according to his commandments or not. In significant contrast to the death penalty mentioned in Num 25:4–5, the parable suggests that the Israelites are merely rebuked by Moses and can change their misconduct of their own will, according to their own insight, and at a time of their own choosing. In addition, like the father/God in the parable of the Father and His Two Sons, the additional blessing of Israel by God demonstrates that God works for his relationship with Israel. Instead of severing the bonds, he restores the relationship and increases Israel’s covenantal blessings after their repentance from their idolatrous worship of Baal Peor.
In view of the severity of Israel’s worship of Baal Peor, however, the king’s doubling of his daughter’s ketubbah and God’s thousandfold blessing of Israel seems bizarre. It explicitly contradicts God’s (and Moses’s) pronouncement of the punishment of death upon Israel in the biblical text (Num 25:4, 5, 9). The parable can be compared with other rabbinic traditions in which the exceptional forgiveness God bestows upon Israel for their worship of Baal Peor is foregrounded (Sifre Num. 136; Sifre Deut. 30) or in which Moses’s burial opposite Baal Peor (b. Sotah 14a; cf. Deut 34:6), the twenty-four books of the Tanakh, and the twenty-four priestly and Levitical divisions are said to atone for Israel’s worship of Baal Peor (both: Num. Rab. 14:18). Other traditions blame the Moabite women for seducing the Israelite men and outsmarting them with the degrading form of Baal Peor’s worship, namely by uncovering oneself (
This contrast between rabbinic and patristic exegesis of the Baal Peor incident reminds one of the contrast between the way the rabbis deal with Israel’s worship of the golden calf and the way the church fathers do. The rabbis mitigate Israel’s sin, by, for instance, blaming the strangers in Israel’s midst (b. Ber. 32a) or arguing that God had forgiven Israel and not rejected them (Lev. Rab. 1:3).54 This mitigation has been explained as an apologetic response of the rabbis to Christian polemics against the Jews in which the golden calf incident played a central role.55 While the rabbis’ degrading presentation of the worship of Baal Peor has already been discussed in view of rabbinic polemics against paganism and Zoroastrianism,56 we still need to consider whether rabbinic apologetics may have been at work in mitigating interpretations of Israel’s worship of Baal Peor as well, for instance in the parable of the Unfaithful Daughter.
5 A Theological Perspective
The parables we have discussed clearly demonstrate how God, despite his potentially restrictive exercise of authority, always leaves an agentival space to human beings. The parabolic imagery of children’s agency gives expression to a world view in which the human free will is defined and delimited, but never completely restrained, by God’s omnipotence. Even when God is in full control of food and non-material resources (i.e., the parable of the Food-Requesting Son), God’s willingness to provide good gifts encourages the parable’s audience to use their limited agentival space to pray to God in confidence. In particular, the parables of the Father and His Two Sons, the Starving Children and Slaves, and the Unfaithful Daughter make clear how this agentival capacity of humankind is beyond God’s direct control. Because of God’s limited exercise of authority, human beings have the freedom and autonomy to pursue their own wishes in accordance with or resistance to God’s will.
The narratological emphasis on children’s agency is used by the parables to hold up a mirror to their audiences, encouraging them to reflect on their own agentival space, motivating them to behave in accordance with social and religious norms, and warning them against undesirable behavioural forms. With its contrast between reward and punishment, the parable of the Starving Children and Slaves encourages its Jewish audience unequivocally to accept their covenantal obligations vis-à-vis God. Yet such appeals are also present in other parables, such as when the audience of the parable of the Father and His Two Sons is invited to identify with one of the two sons. Those who identify as obedient children are challenged by the parable’s open ending to reconsider their behaviour towards repenting community members and to reassess their own attitude towards God (am I behaving like a child or a slave?). On the other hand, wayward community members may have felt addressed as well. Since God rewards the human (re)turn for the better and restores his relationship with “lost” children, they may have felt reassured that their past mistakes do not mean the end of the relationship—there is always a way back. This is true for the audience of the parable of the Unfaithful Daughter as well.
The portrayed agentival space for human autonomy has an effect on the image of God in New Testament and early rabbinic parables, which is given parabolic shape in a broad spectrum of depictions of human father figures that range from brutal to average to indulgent. In this process, God regularly becomes susceptible to challenge and resistance. Interestingly, this applies to both overly restrictive and remarkably compliant behaviour. The king who lets his children starve to death may have provoked criticism from the parable’s audience, while the father who slaughters the fattened calf for the prodigal son, visits his angry son in the field, or gives his daughter the opportunity to be sexually active and later doubles her marriage contract does not correspond to the ancient ideal of masculinity. Both kinds of imagery for God as an excessively cruel or exorbitantly forgiving father provoke a strong emotional reaction from the audience as part of the intended message, deterrent as in Sifre Deut. 40 or encouragement as in Mekh. Deut. 1:11 and Luke 15:11–32. But there is more to it. The cognitive dissonance caused by both types of parables is probably part of their moral persuasion. They appeal to the basic human need for harmonious relationships between fathers and children, as they are portrayed in the parable of the Food-Requesting Son. A father whose exercise of authority honours the needs of his children and a child who does not challenge his or her father’s position of authority are considered aspiring ideals in the real world and also for the relationship with God.
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This article is an expanded version of Albertina Oegema and Annette Merz, “Kinder als handelnde Subjekte in neutestamentlichen und rabbinischen Gleichnissen,” ZNT 48 (2021): 27–43.
See Ville Vuolanto, “Experience, Agency, and the Children in the Past: The Case of Roman Childhood,” in Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World, ed. Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto (London: Routledge, 2017), 17.
Albertina Oegema, “Negotiating Paternal Authority and Filial Agency: Fathers and Sons in Early Rabbinic Parables” (PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2021), 76–88.
See, e.g., David Flusser, Die rabbinischen Gleichnisse und der Gleichniserzähler Jesus, vol. 1, Das Wesen der Gleichnisse, JudChr 4 (Bern: Lang, 1981).
For an overview of these anti-Jewish stereotypes in the interpretation history of this parable, see Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 54–58, 64–66.
See esp. Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “God and Israel as Father and Son in Tannaitic Literature” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1987); Eckhard Rau, Reden in Vollmacht: Hintergrund, Form und Anliegen der Gleichnisse Jesu, FRLANT 149 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990); Wolfgang Pöhlmann, Der Verlorene Sohn und das Haus: Studien zu Lukas 15, 11–32 im Horizont der antiken Lehre von Haus, Erziehung und Ackerbau, WUNT 68 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993); Teaseong Roh, Die familia dei in den synoptischen Evangelien: Eine redaktions- und sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung zu einem urchristlichen Bildfeld, NTOA 37 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001); Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “God the Father in Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity: Transformed Background or Common Ground?,” JES 38 (2001): 470–504.
On the parable of the Children at the Market (Matt 11:16–19//Luke 7:31–35), see most recently Sharon Betsworth, “Children Playing in the Marketplaces,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Children in the Bible and the Biblical World, ed. Sharon Betsworth and Julie Faith Parker (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 245–263. Other parables are usually referred to in passing. An exception is Bettina Eltrop, Denn solchen gehört das Himmelreich: Kinder im Matthäusevangelium: Eine feministisch-sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Stuttgart: Verlag Ulrich E. Grauer, 1996), 53–59, 84–91, 122–126, 135–143, 144–148. See also Amram Tropper, “The Economics of Jewish Childhood in Late Antiquity,” HUCA 76 (2005): 212–213, 222, 226, 229, 231–232; Amram Tropper, “Children and Childhood in Light of the Demographics of the Jewish Family in Late Antiquity,” JSJ 37 (2006): 306, 317–318.
Oegema, “Paternal Authority.” In a recently published article, Oegema compares the role of children’s agency in Synoptic and rabbinic parables. See Albertina Oegema, “What Are These Sons Doing? Filial Agency in New Testament and Early Rabbinic Writings,” ZNW 113 (2022): 261–283.
See Eric Ottenheijm, “On the Rhetoric of ‘Inheritance’ in Synoptic and Rabbinic Parables,” in Parables in Changing Contexts: Essays on the Study of Parables in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, ed. Eric Ottenheijm and Marcel Poorthuis (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 15–36, for a treatment of the concept of inheritance in Luke 15:11–32 and rabbinic parables, touching also briefly on the parables in Sifre Deut. 40 and Luke 11:11–13 (pp. 25–26).
See esp. Simon Légasse, Jésus et l’enfant: « Enfants », « petits » et « simples » dans la tradition synoptique (Paris: Gabalda, 1969); John S. Pridmore, The New Testament Theology of Childhood (Hobart: Buckland, 1977); Hans-Reudi Weber, Jesus and the Children: Biblical Resources for Study and Preaching (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1979).
Peter Müller, In der Mitte der Gemeinde: Kinder im Neuen Testament (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1992); William A. Strange, Children in the Early Church (Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1996); Eltrop, Himmelreich.
Philippe Ariès, L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1960). English translation: Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).
Besides the publications mentioned in the main text, see esp. Peter Balla, The Child-Parent Relationship in the New Testament and Its Environment, WUNT 155 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); Margaret Y. MacDonald, The Power of Children: The Construction of Christian Families in the Greco-Roman World (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014); Arthur James Murphy, Kids and Kingdom: The Precarious Presence of Children in the Synoptic Gospels (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013).
Cornelia B. Horn and John W. Martens, “Let the Little Children Come to Me”: Childhood and Children in Early Christianity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009).
Sharon Betsworth, The Reign of God Is Such As These: A Socio-Literary Analysis of Daughters in the Gospel of Mark, LNTS 422 (London: T&T Clark, 2010); Sharon Betsworth, Children in Early Christian Narratives, LNTS 521 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
Amy Lindeman Allen, For Theirs Is the Kingdom: Inclusion and Participation of Children in the Gospel According to Luke (Lanham, MD: Fortress Academic, 2019).
Marcia J. Bunge, ed., The Child in Christian Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); Martin Ebner, ed., Gottes Kinder, JBTh 17 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2002); Marcia J. Bunge, Terence E. Fretheim, and Beverly Roberts Gaventa, eds., The Child in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).
Sharon Betsworth and Julie Faith Parker, eds., T&T Clark Handbook of Children in the Bible and the Biblical World (London: T&T Clark, 2019).
Esp. Laurel W. Koepf-Taylor, Give Me Children or I Shall Die: Children and Communal Survival in Biblical Literature (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013); Julie Faith Parker, Valuable and Vulnerable: Children in the Hebrew Bible, Especially the Elisha Cycle, BJS 355 (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2013).
Kristine Henriksen Garroway and John W. Martens, eds., Children and Methods: Listening to and Learning from Children in the Biblical World, BSJS 67 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
Kristine Henriksen Garroway, “Conclusions: The Childist Criticism of the Future,” in Children and Methods: Listening to and Learning from Children in the Biblical World, ed. Kristine Henriksen Garroway and John W. Martens, BSJS 67 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 217.
Leopold Löw, Beiträge zur jüdischen Alterthumskunde, vol. 2, Die Lebensalter in der jüdischen Literatur: Von physiologischem, rechts-, sitten- und religionsgeschichtlichem Standpunkte betrachtet (Szegedin: Druck von Sigmund Burger, 1875).
Salomon Schechter, “The Child in Jewish Literature,” JQR 2 (1889): 1–24; Israel Lebendiger, “The Minor in Jewish Law,” JQR 6 (1915–1916): 459–493; 7 (1916–1917): 89–111, 145–174; William M. Feldman, The Jewish Child: Its History, Folklore, Biology, and Sociology (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1917).
Oliver Larry Yarbrough, “Parents and Children in the Jewish Family of Antiquity,” in The Jewish Family in Antiquity, ed. Shaye J.D. Cohen, BJS 289 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 39–59; Adele Reinhartz, “Parents and Children: A Philonic Perspective,” in The Jewish Family in Antiquity, ed. Shaye J.D. Cohen, BJS 289 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 61–88; Ross S. Kraemer, “Jewish Mothers and Daughters in the Greco-Roman World,” in The Jewish Family in Antiquity, ed. Shaye J.D. Cohen, BJS 289 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 89–112.
Hagith Sivan, Jewish Childhood in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Sivan was a participant in the research project “Tiny Voices from the Past: New Perspectives on Childhood in Early Europe” (2013–2017), financed by the Norwegian Research Council and the University of Oslo and led by Reidar Aasgaard.
Sivan, Jewish Childhood, 267–389.
Oegema, “Paternal Authority.” See also Oegeman, “What Are These Sons Doing?”.
The following section is based upon Oegema, “Paternal Authority,” 60–66.
Cf. the core definition of Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, “What Is Agency?,” AJS 103 (1998): 962–1023: “We define it [sc. human agency] as the temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environments—the temporal-relational contexts of action—which, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations” (970).
Sandra J.T.M. Evers, Catrien Notermans, and Erik van Ommering, “Ethnographies of Children in Africa: Moving beyond Stereotypical Representations and Paradigms,” in Not Just a Victim: The Child as Catalyst and Witness of Contemporary Africa, ed. Sandra J.T.M. Evers, Catrien Notermans, and Erik van Ommering, ASCS 20 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 3–5, 12–16.
Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto, “A New Paradigm for the Social History of Childhood and Children in Antiquity,” in Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World, ed. Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto (London: Routledge, 2017), 4–5.
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5–10, 153–154, 167–174; Orit Avishai, “‘Doing Religion’ in a Secular World: Women in Conservative Religions and the Question of Agency,” GenSoc 22 (2008): 410–413, 420–422, 428. Cf. Kelsy C. Burke, “Women’s Agency in Gender-Traditional Religions: A Review of Four Approaches,” SocComp 6 (2012): 123–128.
9
See Christine Gerber, “Bitten lohnt sich (Vom bittenden Kind): Q 11,9–13 (Mt 7,7–11 / Lk 11,9–13),” in Kompendium der Gleichnisse Jesu, ed. Ruben Zimmermann et al. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007), 119–125.
This right is illustrated by an ancient letter in which a soldier orders his pregnant wife to raise the newborn if it is a boy, but abandon it if a girl (P.Oxy. 744).
Richard P. Saller, “Pietas, Obligation and Authority in the Roman Family,” in Alte Geschichte und Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift für Karl Christ zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Peter Kneissl and Volker Losemann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 393–410.
See Oegema, “Paternal Authority,” 186–195.
The mention of the Holy Spirit in Luke 11:13b is due to Lukan redaction. Q, as in Matt 7:11, probably read
MS London, MS Berlin, and Editio Princeps read
MS Vatican reads
Oegema, “Paternal Authority,” 199–200. On food crises and malnutrition, see Peter Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity, KTAH (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–4, 34–36, 52–60.
See the assessment of this issue in Oegema, “Paternal Authority,” 197–198, 199.
See David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 130–145; Dov Weiss, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism, Divinations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 114–119.
Stern, Parables, 132.
Cf. Jörg Frey, “Die Fragmente des Nazoräerevangeliums,” in Antike christliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung, vol. 1.1, Evangelien und Verwandtes, ed. Christoph Markschies and Jens Schröter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 639, nr. 101: “Mit Hilfe dieser Variante will Eusebius die für ihn allzu harte Drohung gegen den Untätigen in Mt 25,30 erklären.”
Alternative possibilities one could think of are: dying of hunger and impoverishment, committing suicide, pursuing a criminal career, begging, prostituting oneself.
See Annette Merz, “Ways of Teaching Compassion in the Synoptic Gospels,” in Considering Compassion: Global Ethics, Human Dignity, and the Compassionate God, ed. L. Juliana Claassens and Frits de Lange (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2018), 66–86; and Françoise Mirguet, An Early History of Compassion: Emotion and Imagination in Hellenistic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
The use of
In rabbinic literature, this verb is applied to a broad range of harmful acts, halakhic violations, corrupt teachings, and socially unacceptable or sexually illicit behaviour. See, e.g., m. Yevam. 10:2; m. Ned. 11:12; m. Sanh. 8:4.
In an age of #MeToo, it should be noted that the parable blames the daughter for her sexual misconduct rather than her sexual partner. The parable mobilizes an ancient cultural rhetoric—which may not have reflected actual social circumstances from a modern perspective—in which women were believed to be less capable of controlling their sexual desires, thus posing a potential threat to men as temptresses and seductresses. On this rabbinic rhetoric, see, e.g., Michael L. Satlow, Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality, BJS 303 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 158–169.
Cf. Oegema, “Paternal Authority,” 418, 420.
Tal Ilan, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine: An Inquiry into Image and Status, TSAJ 44 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 61–62; Michael L. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 118–119.
Satlow, Tasting the Dish, 155–156; Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 102–103.
Cf. Oegema, “Paternal Authority,” 419.
For these and many other references, see Arthur Marmorstein, Studies in Jewish Theology, ed. Joseph Rabbinowitz and Meyer S. Lew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 198–214.
See Marmorstein, Studies, 198–208, 210–212; Marcel Poorthuis, “Sacrifice as Concession in Christian and Jewish Sources: The Didascalia Apostolorum and Rabbinic Literature,” in The Actuality of Sacrifice: Past and Present, ed. Alberdina Houtman, Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua J. Schwartz, and Joseph Turner, JCP 28 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 179–180n12. In this respect, it may be noteworthy that some traditions in Numbers Rabbah relate Israel’s worship of Baal Peor to that of the golden calf or even claim that the former was worse than the latter (Num. Rab. 9:44, 20:23).
Ephraim E. Urbach, “The Rabbinical Laws of Idolatry in the Second and Third Centuries in the Light of Archaeological and Historical Facts,” IEJ 9 (1959): 241–244; Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs and Manners of Palestine in the I Century BCE.–IV Century CE, TSJTS 18 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962), 120–121; Paul Michael Kurtz and Martin Lockshin, “Baal-Peor,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, ed. Constance M. Furey et al., 21– vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010–), 3:cc. 221–224; Natalie C. Polzer, “The Fatal Chamber Pot and the Idol of Pe’or: Covert Anti-Zoroastrian Polemic in the Bavli?,” JJS 67 (2016): 285–288.