What we need to know about this often misunderstood Middle
Eastern parable.

Kenneth E. Bailey

I was stunned! It was 1958 in Jerusalem. A British scholar and
churchman, Dr. Kenneth Cragg, was lecturing on the Muslim-Christian
debates of the Middle Ages. He had just pointed out that the Muslim
scholars of the period loved to quote the parable of the Prodigal
Son as evidence against Christians.

The reason was that, in the story, a son who leaves his father
(God), goes into a far country, gets into trouble, decides to
return home, is on his arrival welcomed, and his return is
celebrated. He needs no incarnation and no atonement, no cross, and
no salvation. There is no mediator between the two of them. He
simply returns home and his father accepts him. Ergo: Jesus is a
good Muslim.

After 40 years, the shock of that speech is still with me. In fact,
that lecture inaugurated my personal pilgrimage into the mind of
Jesus of Nazareth with this famous text as a road map. Was there
any response to this centuries-old Muslim challenge?

This story badly needs to be rescued from familiarity and from its
traditional cultural captivity. For centuries, we in the West have
read the story in the light of our own cultural presuppositions,
which have dulled its cutting edge.

I spent most of my childhood in Egypt, and from 1955 to 1995 our
family lived in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Cyprus, where I
taught New Testament in seminaries and institutes. For all of my
adult life, it has been my privilege to study the New Testament
while living and teaching in the Middle East. Indeed, when I began
to take seriously the traditional Middle Eastern culture of which
Jesus was a part, the parable of “the father and his two lost sons”
began to unfold for me in a new and exciting way.

In the light of that culture, available through early Jewish and
Eastern Christian sources, answers can be found to the original
challenge with which my pilgrimage began. In short–are the
Incarnation and the Atonement a part of this crucial parable? Yes,
they are. I will try to explain why.

Luke’s trilogy

This parable must be seen as the third part of a trilogy in Luke
15. The Pharisees challenge Jesus: “This fellow welcomes sinners
and eats with them” (quotations taken from the NRSV unless
otherwise noted).

The Babylonian Talmud makes clear that rabbis did not eat with the
‘am-ha’arets (the people of the land) who did not keep the law in a
precise fashion. Luke records, “So he told them [the Pharisees]
this parable [singular].” What follows are the three parables of
the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the two lost sons (the Prodigal
Son).

Thus we see that Luke understood them to be three parts of a single
parable. A shepherd pays a price to find and restore a lost sheep.
The woman does the same for her coin. In these two stories it is
clear that Jesus is the good shepherd and he is the good woman.
Which raises a question about the third story: Is he also the good
father? And does this third story parallel the first two stories by
having the father pay a high price to find and restore his son(s)?

To answer these questions, which point to the larger issue of
atonement and incarnation, at least 14 aspects of the parable need
to be rescued from their traditional interpretation.

1. The request.

The younger son requests his inheritance while his father is still
alive and in good health. In traditional Middle Eastern culture,
this means, “Father, I am eager for you to die!” If the father is a
traditional Middle Eastern father, he will strike the boy across
the face and drive him out of the house. Surely anywhere in the
world this is an outrageous request. The Prodigal is not simply a
young boy who is “off to the big city to make his fame and
fortune.” Rather, this young son makes a request that is
unthinkable, particularly in Middle Eastern culture.

The father is expected to refuse–if he is an oriental patriarch!
In fact, he is not, which brings us to the second point.

2. The father’s gift.

The father grants the Prodigal the freedom to own and to sell his
portion of the estate. Five times in the parable the father does
not behave like a traditional oriental patriarch. This is the first
instance. The inheritance is substantial. This is a wealthy family
that has a herd of fatted calves and a herd of goats. House
servants/slaves appear. The house includes a banquet hall large
enough to host a crowd that will eat an entire fatted calf in one
evening. Professional musicians and dancers are hired for that
banquet. The father is respected in the community, and thus the
community responds to his invitation. Transferring the inheritance
is a serious matter that should only be dealt with by the father as
he approaches death.

Furthermore, the Prodigal “gathered all he had,” or as the New
English Bible puts it, “turned [it] into cash.” This means that he
is selling his part of the family farm. As that happens, this
horrendous family breakdown becomes public knowledge, and the
family is shamed before the entire community. Jewish law of the
first century provided for the division of an inheritance (when the
father was ready to make such a division), but did not grant the
children the right to sell until after the father’s death.

In a second departure from the expected norm, the father grants the
inheritance and the right to sell, knowing that this right will
shame the family before the community. Thus, from the opening lines
of the parable, it is clear that Jesus does not use an oriental
patriarch as a model for God. In the contemporary West, Jesus is
often accused of having done so. Such is not the case. Rather, he
has broken all the bounds of Middle Eastern patriarchy in creating
this image of father. No human father is an adequate model for God.
Knowing this, Jesus elevates the figure of father beyond its human
limitations and reshapes it for use as a model for God.

3. The hurried sale.

The Prodigal sells quickly (“A few days later”). He is obliged to
do so. Anger in the village rises against him because he has shamed
his father and his entire extended family by offering a large
portion of the family farm for sale with a healthy father still
farming it. He has to conclude the sale and get out of town as
quickly as possible. As noted, Jewish law did not permit such a
sale. The Prodigal does not care.

4. The qetsatsah ceremony.

>From the Jerusalem Talmud it is known that the Jews of the time of
Jesus had a method of punishing any Jewish boy who lost the family
inheritance to Gentiles. It was called the “qetsatsah ceremony.”
Horror at such a loss is also reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Such a violator of community expectations would face the qetsatsah
ceremony if he dared to return to his home village.

The ceremony was simple. The villagers would bring a large
earthenware jar, fill it with burned nuts and burned corn, and
break it in front of the guilty individual. While doing this, the
community would shout, “So-and-so is cut off from his people.” From
that point on, the village would have nothing to do with the
wayward lad.

>From the various references to this ceremony, it appears that the
ban was more comprehensive than the Amish “shun.” When shunned, an
Amish person can at least eat at a separate table. The first-
century Jewish shun appears to have been a total ban on any contact
with the violator of the village code of honor. As he leaves town,
the Prodigal knows he must not lose the money among the Gentiles.
He does. In the far country he lives among Gentiles. They own pigs!

5. Expensive living.

Many times the Prodigal is accused of “loose living” or “riotous
living.” The Greek adjective in this phrase, however, does not
imply immorality. (Syriac and Arabic translations in the Middle
East have for 18 centuries preserved this finely tuned detail.)
Jesus gives no hint as to how the Prodigal wasted his money. We are
only told that he was a spendthrift.

At the end of the story the older son publicly accuses his brother
of spending the money on harlots. But he has just arrived from the
field and knows nothing. He clearly wants to exaggerate his
brother’s failures. This tension in the story disappears when words
such as “riotous living” (KJV), “loose living” (RSV), or “dissolute
living” (NRSV) appear in the text.

6. The search for employment.

When his money is spent, the Prodigal would naturally return home.
But he has broken the rules. He knows that the qetsatsah ceremony
awaits him if he returns to the village. He is thus desperate to
somehow recover the money. For this he needs a paying job. Twice he
tries to obtain one. The first attempt is feeding pigs in the far
country. The second is the game plan he vocalizes on the eve of his
return home. These two plans must be looked at with some care.

The first plan, becoming a pig herder, does not work. The text
deliberately affirms, “No one gave him anything.” Like Lincoln’s
Gettysburg address, this parable contains no excess verbiage. Each
phrase is carefully crafted to carry precise meaning. As a pig
herder, the Prodigal is fed but not paid. The first-century Jewish
reader knows the Prodigal must earn back the money he wasted if he
is to avoid the qetsatsah ceremony.

Having failed at his first try, he plans one last roll of the dice–
he will go home, get job training, and earn his way. To be accepted
for that job training, he will need his father’s endorsement. But
how will he convince his father to trust him one more time?

7. The self-serving plan.

Perhaps the most theologically damaging traditional
misunderstanding of this parable is in the popular perception of
the phrase, “He came to himself.” This has long been interpreted as
meaning “he repented.” This reading of the text dulls its cutting
edge and breaks up the theological unity of the chapter.

The good shepherd must traverse the wilderness to find his sheep.
He does not return to the village and wait for the sheep to wander
home and bleat at the door of the sheepfold. The good woman lights
a lamp and searches diligently to find the lost coin. She does not
resume her chores expecting the coin to flip itself out of a crack
in the floor and land on the kitchen table.

In short, the first two stories are Augustinian. The sheep and the
coin must be rescued. But if the Prodigal manages to make his way
home by his own efforts, then the third story is Pelagian or at
least semi-Pelagian. That is, it teaches that people are not
impeded by original sin or depraved wills and can by their own
effort, without divine grace, take steps toward salvation.

In the first story, the lost sheep is a symbol of repentance, and
repentance is shown there as “acceptance of being found.” The
second story confirms this definition. But if the Prodigal truly
repents in the far country and struggles home on his own, then
Jesus contradicts himself.

As traditionally understood, the third story affirms the opposite
of the first two. Either Jesus is theologically confused or
repentance is an elastic concept that is open to both an
Augustinian and a Pelagian interpretation. I find both options
unacceptable. Is there an alternative?

By telling the parable of the Good Shepherd, Jesus invokes Psalm
23, which also has a lost sheep and a good shepherd. The key phrase
appears in verse 3, which is traditionally translated, “He restores
my soul.” This statement has come to mean: I was downcast, and the
Lord restored my spirits. That understanding is, no doubt, a part
of the psalmist’s intention. But the Hebrew reads “yashubib
nefshi,” which literally means, “He brings me back,” or “He causes
me to repent.” Clearly, the psalmist is lost, and God, the good
shepherd, brings him back to the paths of righteousness.

When the Prodigal’s speech is read in this light, a new meaning
emerges. The psalmist believed God brought him back (to God) and
caused him to repent. The Prodigal is going to solve his own
problem–he came to himself. The verb for return does not appear!
The long, rich history of Arabic versions contains a number of
interesting translations of this key phrase. Some read, “He got
smart.” Others translate, “He took an interest in himself” or “He
thought to himself.” None of these translators saw the Prodigal in
the far country as repentant. Ah–but what of his “confession”?

The prepared confession reads, “I have sinned against heaven and
before you,” and this is (understandably) usually seen to indicate
heartfelt repentance. Jesus’ audience, however, is composed of
Pharisees who know the Scriptures well. They recognize that
confession as a quotation from the pharaoh when he tries to
manipulate Moses into lifting the plagues. After the ninth plague,
Pharaoh finally agrees to meet Moses, and when Moses appears,
Pharaoh gives this same speech. Everyone knows that Pharaoh is not
repenting. He is simply trying to bend Moses to his will.

The Prodigal is best understood as attempting the same. Hoping to
soften his father’s heart, the Prodigal plans to offer his solution
to the problem of their estrangement: job training. He will work as
a paid craftsman and be able to save money. He will not live at
home for the present. But after the lost money is recovered, he can
discuss reconciliation. Having failed to get a paying job in the
far country, he will try to get his father’s backing to become
gainfully employed near home. He will yet save himself through the
law. No grace is necessary. He can manage–or so he thinks! But is
the lost money the real problem?

In his soliloquy in the far country, the Prodigal opens his mind
and spirit to the listener/reader. Wanting to eat, he says, “I am
dying of hunger!” He thinks that if he can only recover the lost
money, everything will eventually be solved. In the interim, he
will be able to eat, and once the money is returned, the village
will accept him back.

He does not consider the father’s broken heart and the agony of
rejected love that his father has endured. While talking to himself
in the far country he evidences no shame or remorse. If he is a
servant standing before a master, his plan is somehow adequate. If
he is a son dealing with a compassionate and loving father, his
projected solution is inadequate.

8. The point of turning.

The Prodigal steels his nerves for his humiliating entrance into
the village. He remembers the qetsatsah ceremony and braces himself
to endure its shame. The painful interview with his father will not
be any easier. His one hope is that his “humble speech” will touch
his father’s heart and that he will win his father’s backing for
the training he needs to become a wage earner.

The Prodigal is expected to return with generous gifts for the
family. Not only does the Prodigal return home empty-handed, he
returns in failure after insulting his family and the village at
departure. This painful road back is endured for one reason: he is
hungry. The bottom line is, “I am dying of hunger!”

But what of his father?

[To be continued…]