Bailey lived in the Middle-East for sixty years, teaching at universities, including during some of the wars in the region. He uses that cultural experience, his readings of several medieval Christian commentators who were middle-eastern and wrote in Arabic, and his biblical literature knowledge to write thirty-two articles which exegete Gospel texts and inform that exegesis with middle-eastern cultural knowledge. This volume contains a couple essays on the events of Jesus’ birth, Jesus’ interactions with women, the Beatitudes, and some of Jesus’ parables. Judging from the footnotes, many essays are condensed from Poets and Peasants and Through Peasant Eyes.

I was hoping that this book gave an overview of culture in Jesus’ time, but instead it only gives culture relevant to the passage under discussion. However, some general description can be synthesized. The middle-east of Jesus’ day was village-oriented. Everyone knew everyone, and major decisions (like buying a field) would be discussed with friends long beforehand. Men serious about God would meet in their spare time to discuss the Torah. Rabbis usually needed to have a job, but spent all their spare time discussing the law, and making rulings on it (such as requested by the guy who asked Jesus to tell his brother to divide the inheritance). One rabbi even moved from Galilee to Jerusalem because he did not get enough such requests in Galilee. When a rabbi came to town, he would be invited to a meal, where the other rabbis would question him to see if he was properly orthodox.

The village would have have one or a handful of wealthy landowners. These would employ stewards, like in several parables. The order of status is owner, wife/kids, steward, foreman, hired laborers, day laborers, slaves. The owners were “gentlemen farmers”, delegating the tasks of running the enterprise to others (for instance, they would not have been going to hire day laborers personally). They are upper class; they do not run, they do not climb trees (the King of Jordan, unable to believe that the US ambassador really had climbed a tree to replace a light bulb himself, instead of having someone do it, asked him one time if the story was true).

Day laborers were at risk of not being able to feed their family, and so the ones eager to work stood in a central location so that they could be the first to dash over to a prospective employer (Bailey observed this in Jerusalem). With most people close to subsistence levels, the handful of rich people would be the only hope for someone like Lazarus, who was too sick to work. Beggars in the middle-east call out, advertising themselves as an opportunity to fulfill your obligation before God to give to the poor. Regardless of how little you give, they loudly proclaim that you are the most generous person, which presumably would be heard throughout the village. However, you do have to have a physical deformity to beg (thus, Jesus’ question to blind Bartimaeus what he wants—if he wants healing, he can not longer beg, but will have no resources and skills to work).

Women were decidedly second-class in Jesus’ time. Author Ben Sirah did not trust women (although he did offer some short praise). One rabbi said that women’s anger was worse than men’s. The Gospel text notes some people asking Jesus about the accepted practice that men could divorce a women for any reason (women, of course, could not divorce men). Sexual propriety was (and is) very important—a woman’s sexual failure would bring shame on the entire family—and men (even Bailey) did not look at unknown women out of propriety. A rabbi would not even talk to his wife or daughters in public. At night, women, even in modern times, walk with a light—not at the ground to light the way, but near their faces, so you can see who they are and know that they are not up to something. Needless to say, Jesus regularly stepped over the line when dealing with women—some women traveled with him, he accepts Mary (of Mary and Martha) as a disciple, he talks with unknown women, etc. Men were (and are) the public face of the family, so the man would go to court, etc. Only a widow who had nobody, would show up in court by herself, and of course, she would have little influence over the judge. However, women could (and can) get away with things than men could not. A judge would not put up with a man coming every day. During one of the military occupations of the city he was in, people would ignore the occupying militia—except for one old woman, dressed in traditional black from head to toe, who would yell at them and tell them to leave. If a man did that he would be shot on the spot, but they would politely tell her that everything would be fine and not to get upset. Another time, when the militias were kidnapping foreigners, he put himself under “house arrest”, but his wife and daughters had no problem buying food.

Tax collectors were viewed as traitors. The Mishnah said that they were unclean, and even said that lying to a tax collector was permissible. They were responsible for a certain tax, and anything over that was theirs to keep, so they were generally rich at other people’s expense. The tax collector praying at the afternoon sacrifice in Jesus’ parable stood back from the people because he knew they considered him unclean, so this way he would not defile him. (The Pharisee stood at a distance because who knew how clean the unwashed masses were, better to be safe than unclean without knowing it.)

The middle-east is an honor/shame culture. Insults, therefore, must be responded to avoid losing reputation. You should also act with appropriate gravitas; gentlemen farmer delegate everything; that’s the point of being rich. You would not do the menial stuff yourself. Collectively, the village/town/city also has honor. When someone important comes to town, people line the streets to welcome them (presumably also because they want to see them, like Zaccheus). The person most able to show the best hospitality the town has to offer will invite the person to stay with them. The town will gain honor from having respectably honored this famous person. (The President of a small country in the Levant visited a city where Bailey was teaching, and the people lined the streets for ten miles, and some miles out, some people insisted on tying ropes to the bumper and pulling the car themselves.

The essays are too analytical too summarize, especially thirty-two of them, but there are certainly broad themes that emerge. Many of the Gospel stories are constructed in the form of prophetic chiasm, that was used in much of Isaiah’s prophetic writings. This is a seven stanza form, usually A1 / B1 / C1 / soliloquy or center / C2 / B2 / A2, and usually the A1 / A2, etc. pairs are inverses (e.g. go up / come down). Luke occasionally breaks the perfection of the poetry to add some parenthetical information, and Bailey sees this as evidence that a (Messianic) Jewish community had already constructed these sayings of Jesus before Luke wrote them down. (Bailey hypothesizes that, Luke, as Paul’s companion, spent the two years while Paul was in prison going around and talking to the eyewitnesses and collecting the community’s sayings.)

Jesus’ attitude towards women was completely counter-cultural. Rabbis in Jesus’ day had very negative views towards women; a proper rabbi would not even talk to his wife in public. Nobody talked with women they did not know (which still common in the middle-east), yet Jesus did it on (at least) several occasions, and even affirmed Martha’s sister Mary as having the right to be a disciple (“sit at the feet of <rabbi>"). The disciples clearly shared the prevailing cultural attitudes—when the Syro-Phoenecian woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter, the disciples, assuming Rabbi Yeshua would not talk to an unknown woman in public, use a common middle-eastern indirect question to ask if Jesus wants them to get rid of her. Jesus does not, and their discomfort over the situation ensures it they remembered the lesson Jesus used the situation to teach. The disciples apparently did eventually come to share Jesus’ view, and so they recorded his pairs of parables: most of Jesus’ parables come in pairs, one with a male situation and one with an equivalent female situation. (For instance, mustard tree [farming, male] and lost coin [widow, female].)

Jesus consistently refuses Isaiah’s prophetic judgements on Gentiles and outsiders. His introduction of himself as the Messiah in Nazareth angered them partly because when he read the Messianic prophecy, he stopped right at the point where Isaiah pronounces judgement on the Gentiles. Bailey believes Nazareth was one of the settler towns that the Jews created during the century when they ruled Galilee directly, to recolonize the area from its Greek culture, and as further evidence, points to the fact that several families of priests moved to Nazareth after the destruction of the Temple. So this would be like Jesus coming to a modern, West-bank settlement, and in the Orthodox synagogue, proclaiming himself Messiah but not condemning Hamas and Hezbollah. Similarly, when they bring a woman caught in adultery (without the man), his answer admits that the penalty is death, but then constructs an enforcement that could never actually be carried out.

Jesus frequently breaks cultural expectations to reconnect people with God. When a famous person passed through a town, people would line the streets and a town notable would invite the person to dinner to show the town’s hospitality. Jesus passes right on through Jericho—and then when the crowd corners the quisling tax collector who partnered with the hated Romnas up the tree he sought out to see Jesus and remain hidden, Jesus invites himself over to the tax collector’s house! The effect was that Zaccheus repented and was restored to community (with God, if not with the physical community). When someone at a more normal banquet spouted off “blessed are those who are invited to the Messianic banquet”, instead of saying something like “oh, that we would keep the Torah well enough to be invited”, he replies with a parable suggesting that the people actually attending the banquet will not look like the pious people they were expected. Jesus parables also break expectation, such as the Prodigal Father, who not only reprocesses his anger at his son’s request to divide the inheritance (which is essentially saying “I wish you were dead, dad”) into forgiveness, but then when his son comes back, quite embarrassingly undignifiedly breaks into a run. Middle-eastern men do not run.

Breaking those expectations often came with Jesus turning the anger of the people from the person they were targetting, onto himself, in a foreshadowing of the Crucifixion. When the crowd is angry at Zaccheus (having found the hated tax collector in a tree, in the safety of a crowd), Jesus’ invitation turns the crowd’s anger from Zaccheus on himself—he is dishonoring our city by eating at the home of a traitor instead of someone honorable who can properly show the hospitality on behalf of the city. Jesus’ grace to the woman caught in adultery also turns the anger onto himself, as he embarrassed the Jewish leaders on their home turf of the Temple, and both he and she know that powerful men embarrassed will come back later with something worse. When Simon the Pharisee insults Jesus by not offering basic hospitality—Bailey speculates that perhaps this was a senior rabbi trying to put this young, unorthodox rabbi in his place before he got too far in the weeds—a woman, who expressed her thankfulness for forgiveness by offering Simon’s hospitality by washing his feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair. Not only did rabbis not interact with women, let alone women of sketchy reputation, who acted in accordance, since a woman only showed her hair privately, beginning on her wedding night. Simon is of course deeply offended by the woman’s actions, but Jesus not only accepts her, but in doing so turns Simon’s anger onto him.

Jesus’ parables do not say what happens. Does the son who stayed with the father eventually come to share the father’s joy over his younger brother’s return? Do the vineyard workers, who are angry because the owner over-paid latecomers with the standard wage, ever see the owner’s value of care for the unemployed who wish to work? We are not told, which invites us to imagine how me might respond.

This lack of resolution is also an invitation of grace. In the middle-east, “no” is just the beginning of negotiations. If an employer tells a middle-eastern employee “you’re fired, get out by 5pm”, he does not start cleaning his desk. Instead, he thinks “wow, the boss is really upset. This is very serious, I’d better get my influential friends to talk with him.” So when Jesus’ parables issue judgment but the parable does not describe it being carried out, it can be taken as saying “what you have done merits this punishment”, but perhaps grace is available (through Jesus, for instance). The people who opposed the noble who went off to a far country to become king (as Herod did, going to Rome) are sentenced to death, but it is not carried out in the parable. The vineyard tenants who kill the son are rightfully under judgement of destruction, but the sentence is not carried out in the parable. In these two cases, it is the religious leaders under the sentence, and there is an invitation for them to repent. Similarly, Jesus’ overlooking of the insult to hi.m by Simon the Pharisee’s lack of common courtesy signals his willingness to forgive Simon. Does Simon repent? We do not know.

Some notes that have no relation to each other:

Bailey gives an insightful commentary on some of the Gospel passages, informed both by a long, personal history with middle-eastern culture, and by biblical scholarship. Judging from the footnotes, I assume that much of the content of this book summarizes the content of Bailey’s books Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes. The essays presented here, while clearly from an academic perspective, are very readable. In fact, they could function as that rarity, a properly exegetical sermon. Bailey must have been evangelical—the essays all conclude with a summary of points we should learn from this text. Although sometimes Bailey’s conclusions are a little too intertwined with his assumptions, his conclusions are usually insightful, and especially for the parables, break them out of the modern Western context that we unconsciously place them in. The chapters on the Beatitudes are a little tedious to work through, and the book is quite voluminous, but the insights are well worth the effort.


Review: 9.5
▶ Notes

Copyright © 2025 by Geoffrey Prewett