Ancient World Seminar: Annette Merz and Eric Ottenheijm, “Let us wait until the harvesting season will come and we will know”: Comparing rabbinic and synoptic parables on harvest

In a Rabbinic parable, the constituent parts of a wheat plant engage in a controversy over the question for whose sake the field was sown. This parable, which shares features of a fable, is adduced in different exegetical contexts (Gen.R 83:4-5); Song of Songs R. 7:3;3; Pes.Rab. 10:4) and its basic material appears as a reworked aggadic midrash as well. In the parable, the wheat replies to the other parts of the plant that the harvest will proof him being right. In the end, when the farmer separates the wheat from the other parts and piles it in heaps on the threshing floor, he is vindicated. This parable, drawing its imagery from common agricultural techniques, shows some similarities in motif with several parables in the Jesus tradition, especially with the parable of the sower, the parable of the wheat growing secretly and the parable of the tares, attested in Mark 4:3-20 (parr. Matt. 13:3-23 ; Luke 8:4-15), Mark 6,26-29 and Matt. 13:24-30 respectively, and with a parabolic saying attributed to John the Baptist in Q 3,17. Both the Rabbinic and the synoptic traditions make recourse to earlier biblical and pseudepigraphical material with some astonishing overlap overlooked in previous scholarship. Moreover, the Rabbinic parable appears to respond to Christian claims, by quoting and reinterpreting Ps. 2:12, a verse adduced in second and third Century Christian discourse to buttress Christological claims.

In this paper we will argue that comparing parables like these requires a method that does not seek for textual genealogy as such but assesses a common ‘Bildfeld’, i.e. harvesting, being applied in different, chronologically separated, contexts. The narrators of the parables chose among the (limited) possibilities of narrative realisations offered by the internal structures of the metaphorical field and variegated according to varying rhetorical purposes. Following this approach, the Christian parables and sayings actually present us with early usages of motifs of this imagery, reflecting inner-Jewish sectarian struggles, travelling to become embedded in a new Rabbinic parable, featuring a secondary, apologetic use to counter Christian Messianic claims. As such, the travel of motifs contained in narrative traditions such as parables tells history, albeit in a non-historical mode.

Prof. Dr. Annette Merz is Professor of New Testament at the Protestant-Theological University in Groningen and researcher at Tilburg University. Dr. Eric Ottenheijm is Assistant Professor Judaism and Biblical Studies at Utrecht University. The investigation of harvest parables in early Christian and rabbinic texts is part of the NWO-funded project on “Parables and the partings of the ways”, hosted at the Universities of Utrecht and Tilburg, which explores the changes within the parable genre in relation to the development of Christianity and Judaism as apart religions. Prof. Merz and Dr. Ottenheijm coordinate the project in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Marcel Poorthuis (Professor of Biblical Sciences and Church History at Tilburg School of Catholic Theology)