I’m hoping this will be the first of a series of articles highlighting common pitfalls in reading the Bible. Here, I am not attempting to expound individual parables (except as examples of how people can read them wrongly), but to show how certain approaches to reading parables are wrong, and can lead to very wrong conclusions
What are Parables?
A parable is in essence a story used to make a theological or moral point. It does this by taking something unknown – an attribute of God, for example, or the moral status of some piece of current affairs – and likening it to something in the story.
A classic example may be found in 2 Samuel 12:1–4. Here, the prophet Nathan tells King David a story about two men, one rich, one poor. In this story, the rich man needs some meat in a hurry to provide for an unexpected guest; instead of taking an animal from his own holdings, he commandeers the poor man’s only lamb, who has been reared almost as a family pet. David at first takes this story literally, and starts to order punitive damages against the rich man, only to have the wind taken out of his sails when Nathan reveals that this story is a parable about David’s own behaviour.
David’s behaviour has been told to the reader already, in chapter 11. Here, David had not led his armies into battle, as kings usually did; instead he had stayed at home, where he had an affair with the wife of one of his army officers. Having got the woman pregnant, he first tried to pass the child off as not his; when this failed, he sent the officer off on a suicide mission so he could marry the woman (alongside the several wives he had already).
Having told David the parable, Nathan launches into a tirade against David’s behaviour, and predicts that worse things will happen to David – while Uriah, David’s officer, never knew what David had been doing with his wife, Nathan predicts that the same thing will happen to David quite openly, where David and everyone else will know about it.
So how does the parable work?
There is a story, in this case about the two men and the lamb.
The story talks about something the audience knows – in this case, the immorality of the rich man’s high-handed behaviour.
The parable then has to link something unknown to this: David presumably didn’t realise (or more likely didn’t stop to think) that it was wrong to murder a man, however indirectly, in order to get at his wife.
Some parables are much shorter; Jesus often used short parables. In Matthew 12:22–24, Jesus has been performing miraculous healings, driving out demons. While some think this must mean he is from God, others say that it is by the Devil’s power that he can drive out demons. Jesus responds by telling a couple of these short parables. First, in verses 25–28, he uses the image of a kingdom divided against itself to make a point about the Devil’s inevitable defeat; then in verse 29, he asks: “How can anyone break into a strong man’s house and make off with his goods, unless he has first tied up the strong man? Then he can ransack the house.” Short though these are, they still have the same three characteristics:
There is a story: a country in a state of civil war that cannot defend against invaders; a housebreaker immobilising his victim before he ransacks the house.
The story tells about things the audience understand: in the Near East, everyone would know that any country that couldn’t sort out its own affairs was ripe for invasion; likewise, no one would have failed to appreciate that if a housebreaker finds the owner in, he won’t be able to steal much unless he first deals with this inconvenience!
The parable links something unknown to this. The maxim about the divided kingdom is used to point out that if the Devil is not being defeated here, his organisation is in such a disordered state that his defeat is inevitable anyway; it makes more sense to deduce that Jesus does not get his power from Satan but from God. The second extends this: if God is ransacking the Devil’s domain, he must already have taken steps to overpower the Devil and bind him.
Where do we Find Parables?
The examples above show that Jesus, so often using parables, was drawing on a tradition going back to King David or earlier. Jesus used longer parables as well as these short ones; the prophetic books of the Old Testament also use parables. An example of a longer one may be found in Ezekiel 23, some shorter ones in Amos 3. These are straightforward examples of the use of parables (although, as with so many of Jesus’s stories, there is room for debate over their interpretation).
Outside the Gospels, the New Testament writers seem superficially not to go in for parables much. Nonetheless they are there. Paul, in Romans 14:1–6, uses some stories in a similar way. Here he tells of two people, both Christians; one who eats meat, the other a vegetarian; and two people, one who insists on a strict Sabbath once a week, the other who will work on any day that is convenient.
The first two elements of the parable are present: the stories (of the two pairs of Christians), linked to something familiar to his readers (there is evidence of heated debates in the early Church about Sabbath observance; vegetarianism may have been similarly linked to debates about kosher observance). The final element – something unknown that is linked to this – is missing, however. Instead, Paul comments directly on the morality of the four characters to make his point: in this case, that different ways of living out one’s Christian faith are valid; in neither of his stories does one character have the right to impose his version on the other.
What the New Testament writers do do, however, is treat Old Testament stories as parables to which they can attach a Christian message. An example of this is in Hebrews 7. The (anonymous) writer here takes a well-known Bible story – his readers were Hebrews, after all, and could be relied on to be familiar with the Old Testament – and uses it to make a point about Jesus.
The story is that of Abram’s meeting with Melchizedek in Genesis 14:18–20. Abram (who would later become Abraham) is returning home from a successful military campaign, and Melchizedek, theocrat of Salem, comes out, gives him food, and blesses him. One of them (the account in Genesis is not clear) gives the other a tenth of everything.
This story being familiar to the readers, the author can use it to make a point about Jesus. Jesus, he says, is a priest of the order of Melchizedek. The writer to the Hebrews plays with the lack of detail in the Bible story. He asserts that it is Abraham who gave a tenth of his booty to Melchizedek, by way of recognising the latter’s authority; just as we are told nothing of Melchizedek’s background, Jesus is the One without beginning or end; and since Melchizedek was King of Salem, a Hebrew name meaning “peace”, Jesus is King of Peace.
Finally, and most controversially, it makes sense for us to read some Old Testament stories as parables even though they are presented as history. In a sense, we are doing what the writer to the Hebrews did with the story of Melchizedek: taking a traditional Jewish story and giving it a Christian meaning. It is worth pointing out that this is not “cultural appropriation” – this way of appropriating stories was itself part of the Jewish tradition within which the author was working.
An example of this is the Book of Jonah. Jonah is one of the twelve “Minor Prophets” – short books that were traditionally collected all on one scroll in Hebrew bibles. Unlike most of these, which are books of prophecy, Jonah is a story: how the prophet received his call to preach to the Ninevites; tried to get out of it by travelling in the opposite direction; and was forcibly sent to Nineveh to do his preaching. There, he preached coming destruction; the people repented of their sin; the destruction was averted; and Jonah proceeded to moan about the way his prophecy hadn’t come true.
This is one of the Old Testament stories that gets used as a parable in the New Testament. Specifically, the episode from Jonah 2, in which he is forcibly returned to land, has him swallowed by a fish and regurgitated when he comes to shore. In Matthew 12:39–40, Jesus uses this story as the known, to which he likens his own death and resurrection as the unknown.
My view is that, while one could read a story of someone miraculously returned to land so he could pursue a prophetic ministry, followed by the story of that ministry, as a historical narrative, it makes at least as much sense to read it all as parable. Here, the parable is incomplete, since we don’t have all the information about the unknown domain, and what it is we are to read out of it. We do have some – chapter 4, for example, contains a fairly complete parable about a shady plant that died, exposing Jonah to the elements, linked to a clear message about how God feels about Nineveh. Nonetheless, we lack the meanings of other parts, such as the story of the storm and the fish in chapters 1–2. This actually helps Jesus to appropriate the story as a parable in Matthew 12.
Pitfalls to Avoid
Don’t Take the Story Literally
Where the story is presented as a person telling a parable, no one would consider taking it literally. When Nathan tells David the parable of the poor man’s lamb, although David takes it literally at first, once Nathan has made it clear it is a parable, nobody reading it thinks it odd that David drops the search for the high-handed rich man. Similarly, when Jesus tells the story of a housebreaker tying up his victim, nobody then or now thinks he is talking about an actual housebreaker who really does this.
Nonetheless, when it comes to a story like Jonah, people say it must be true, because it’s the Word of God! If we, as Christians, believe that Jesus is God, then any story he tells must be the Word of God at least as much as an Old Testament story is. So if we can say that he told stories that weren’t true, to make a point, then surely we can say that some stories included in the Old Testament, equally the Word of God, are equally untrue, but told to make a point.
One commentary I read states that Jesus’s use of the Jonah in Matthew 12 requires the story to be true. This is nonsense! What it requires is for his listeners to have been familiar with the story.
The point is that while Hitler was a real politician, Chaplin the screen persona of a real film-maker, and Holmes purely fictional, they are all used in exactly the same way: something known to the reader to which the Bible story can be linked.
Don’t Read the Parable Backwards
There is always something known in the parable to which the unknown is linked. The parable, however, is intended to teach us something about the unknown, not to teach us about the known.
Some of Jesus’s parables can be quite hard to interpret. For example, in Luke 16:1–13, Jesus tells a story of a manager who had been embezzling company funds. When he is found out, and knows he will be sacked, he doesn’t want to end up as a beggar, and he knows he couldn’t be much use as a labourer, so he uses more company money to create a community of people who owe him favours. When his boss discovers this, he commends the manager for his cleverness.
Part of the meaning of this we are told: the way this manager created a community of people who owed him favours is supposed to illustrate the way we should lay out our own money – not to spend it all on ourselves, but in doing good for other people (verse 9) – although even this is open to interpretation. We are also told (of the higher boss who commended him) that worldly people often have a better understanding of how to get on in such situations than more spiritual people (verse 8).
What we must not do, however, is take this story as teaching us anything about the manager’s initial dishonesty. Although it is used as an analogy for things we are encouraged to do, we must not take this parable as an indication that this sort of dishonesty is what God wants of us – not even in a hybrid form (embezzle from your employer to give to charity?)
This is not the clearest parable, but it is not difficult to see when one has turned it backwards. Other parables can easily be turned backwards without noticing, though. One such is Ezekiel 23. In this long chapter, much of it is a story about two sisters who went to Egypt and worked as (apparently high-class) prostitutes.
We are told at the start that they represent Jerusalem and Samaria – the capitals of the two Hebrew kingdoms. What we are not told, however, is what was going on in the capital cities. This, unfortunately, was probably supposed to be known to the listeners – what was not (or not widely) known was how immoral this was. The parable is designed to tell the listeners how immoral the culture of the two capitals was, by comparing it to the prostitution of these two girls (possibly under-age, and without their parents’ consent).
What the parable is not there to tell us is what God thinks of the girls’ working as prostitutes. I have seen (and commented on in a previous post) this parable held up as evidence that God disapproves of girls letting their breasts be fondled (verse 3) without even any discussion of whether this is a euphemism for more serious activities or an indication that the girls didn’t actually do anything more serious.
It is certain that Ezekiel’s audience would have been disgusted at the girls’ behaviour; that disgust is the known to which God’s feelings about the two cities are being likened. However, just as Jesus can use a story of dishonest practices to illustrate the (not at all dishonest) way he wants us to think of money, without implying anything about those practices, so can Ezekiel use a story of girls letting men fondle their breasts to illustrate what he is saying about Jerusalem and Samaria, without implying anything about the girls’ activities. This is not to say that such things carry no moral taint, still less that we have biblical evidence that they carry no moral taint; merely that this parable is not evidence per se that these things are immoral.
The point is that if it were valid to read the parable backwards like that – as a condemnation of prostitution, or even of petting above the waist – we would have a valid reading of Jesus’s parable saying that the dishonesty he describes is a good thing.
Don’t Over-Extend the Metaphor
I have heard it preached that a parable, unlike an allegory, makes only one point; it is wrong to try and find analogies between each detail in the parable and a corresponding detail in the real world.
While this is simplistic – many parables make more than one point, and some make a point in several of their details – there is a definite pitfall here. Christianity has a tradition of allegorical readings, which certainly have their place; but it is a mistake to look for such a reading and then assert that this is what the parable is there to teach us.
Luke 8:5–8 contains a good example of this. The story is of a sower, scattering seed (seed drills that placed the seed carefully in the furrow would not be available for many centuries). Some of the seed goes into the good soil that has been prepared for it, but other seed falls on a hard path, or among rocks, or among weeds.
Jesus gives an explanation in verses 11–15: the seed is the Word; while for many, the word takes root, develops and bears fruit, for others it is prevented by various problems. Jesus even details the problems and assigns a meaning to each one: on the path, the seed is picked up by birds, representing the Devil, who makes them forget the word as soon as they’ve heard it; on the rocks, it cannot get a good enough hold to get enough nourishment and water, representing people whose faith is superficial, and does not survive testing; and among weeds, it is choked out by the (already mature) plants with which it must compete, representing people whose other interests have already taken over their life, not allowing anything else in.
So far, so good. We can see that there is more than just a single point. But we mustn’t take this further. For example, the people who forget the word straight away (through the Devil’s influence) are represented by a footpath where the seed gets trampled (or maybe the path has been trampled). We could try and find a meaning for the people doing the trampling, just as the Devil is represented by the birds who eat the seed. While this might be useful, we mustn’t conclude that this is what Luke – still less Jesus – intended.
Another way one can go into too much detail is illustrated in verses 11 and 12. In verse 11, the seed is the Word; but in verse 12 (and for the rest of the explanation) the seed is likened to the different sorts of people who hear the Word. One could accuse Luke, or even Jesus, of getting in a muddle here; maybe Luke was compiling this from two different versions. This is possible – Jesus probably preached this on several occasions – but I think it is more likely that the problem arose translating from Aramaic (which Jesus had presumably been speaking) into the Greek that Luke wrote down: where Luke wrote “The seed along the footpath stands for those who hear it”, Jesus may have said something more like “The seed falling on the footpath stands for when people hear it” – likening the events (seed falling on the path, people hearing the Word), rather than directly comparing the people to the seed. When Matthew records the same parable (Matt. 13:3–8, with an explanation in verses 19–23), he doesn’t even put in the bit about the seed representing the Word.
Another way people sometimes over-extend the metaphor is by looking too deeply at the characters in the parable. While examining characters in great detail, working out their motivations, is something one can do in literary analysis, it is not of much benefit here. Staying with the same parable, one could ask why the sower is being so careless with his seed. One might conclude that it is because God wants everyone to have heard his word, whether or not they are going to respond to it; this then leads to the idea that one shouldn’t refrain from trying to reach someone with the Gospel simply because they are unlikely to respond. This is a valid point, but although studying this parable has led to it, it is not inherent in it.
If one were to examine the motives of the birds, on the other hand, one would conclude that, just as the birds steal the seed to eat, the Devil plucks the word from people’s memories because that is how he is nourished – a preposterous interpretation! Or maybe one would conclude that the seed really does represent people, not the Word (going directly against Jesus’s statement in verse 11), and that the ground is the Word. The Devil is thus taking the people out of the Word, not vice versa, and the interpretation is getting hopelessly tangled.
This last pitfall is an especial risk when one is reading ostensibly historical books, such as Jonah, as parables. There is a wealth of detail there, and some of it has meaning. The shady plant in chapter 4, for example, represents Nineveh, and when it dies, exposing Jonah to the sun and wind, this represents the punishment that Jonah had prophesied, but which had not happened. The fish in chapter 2 is not given a meaning here, but Jesus gives it one later. This is something he can do authoritatively; if we invent a meaning, we must not behave as though this was what was intended. But what about (for example) the sailors in chapter 1? We have considerable detail about their fighting against the storm, drawing lots, refusing to throw Jonah overboard, and so on. We can speculate about the meaning, and we might gain some valuable insights, but we must not claim that our speculations are what the writer – still less God – intended.
One more direction in which the metaphor can be over-extended is to look at other implications of the story as if these are as important as the message the speaker or writer intended. Jesus told his short parable of the divided kingdom in response to suggestions that he was driving out demons by the Devil’s power. One could interpret this as a general ordering his troops to retreat – not evidence of civil disorder, but of strategy that might give misleading impressions to the enemy and lure him into a trap. This suggests that the Devil is using Jesus to lure the crowds – who have watched the miraculous healings – into a trap. Whether or not it is true (and Christians do not believe that Jesus is doing the Devil’s work, here or anywhere else!), Jesus would not have been trying to say this!
Don’t Invent Details
This is a pitfall with bible stories whether we take them literally or as parables. Staying with Jonah, we have passages with a wealth of detail, and passages with almost none. After all the detail of the storm and the fish, but before the parable of the shady plant, chapter 3 sees Jonah preaching to the Ninevites: “In forty days Nineveh will be overthrown!” That’s it. Just that one sentence. Nothing about why. Nothing about how the people recognised the truth of his message. Similarly, after Jonah has been thrown overboard in chapter 1, and the storm has miraculously subsided, the crew offer a sacrifice and swear vows.
In chapter 3, there is little to which we can attach our speculation, although it is tempting to try. In chapter 1, however, we can readily speculate about the sacrifice and the vows, and I have even seen purely speculative material about the vows find its way into translations, not just commentaries.
When reading such passages as parables, the important thing is to remember that inventing details to analyse guarantees that any analogies you draw with those details will be speculative.
That said, researching the culture, and finding details that the hearers might have been expected to assume, is instructive, and can help our interpretation. For example, if we know about how ships were run in the centuries before Christ we can better understand what the sailors are doing in the Jonah story. What we must not do, is use this knowledge to invent details that are not there, and then attach meaning to those details.
To Sum Up
Parables appear throughout the Bible. Jesus used them a lot, and both he and the epistle writers co-opted Old Testament stories to use as parables. This use of Old Testament stories was a part of Jewish culture, and it makes sense to read some stories as though they were intended for this purpose. We should not assume that every story in the Bible was intended literally; still less should we assume that because Jesus or an epistle writer cites a story to make a point, this provides evidence for the story’s literal truth.
No matter whether we are interpreting parables that are clearly presented as such or passages that may or may not be factual, we must not attach meaning to too many details, still less to details that aren’t even there.
Finally, we must not read the parable as a commentary on the story. The story is being used to make a point about something known to the listeners; to read the parable backwards invites wrong conclusions, and, in the case of some of Jesus’s parables, risks imputing divine approval to highly dishonest practices.
Further Reading
Michael Korth, Klaus Pitter: Schnell-Bibel: für eilige Christen. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1990.
This is in German, but it is by far the best example I have found of using fictional and real characters alike to make a rhetorical point. As well as those cited, we get David as Elvis (real) and Samson as Struwelpeter (fictional – but not well known outside Germany).
The illustration I have used of Joseph transforming into the great dictator is from page 13.
