Bible Study for Amateurs #61 – Crumbs from the Table, part 1

In Matthew 15:21-28 we read the story of Jesus’s interaction with an unnamed Canaanite woman. Jesus had left Gennesaret for the district of Tyre and Sidon when, upon arrival in the region, the woman shouted to him: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon” (v. 23, NRSV).¹ Jarringly, Jesus doesn’t answer her, and the disciples want him to drive her away. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” Jesus tells them in v. 24. Undeterred, the woman asks Jesus for help again but receives an offensive retort from him: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he says to her. Still, she persists, replying in v. 27, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Verse 28 then reports, “Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.”

This pericope, taken and reworked by the Evangelist from Mark 7:24-30, is as encouraging as it is disturbing. It is quite clearly a story about faith: persistent, unrelenting, persevering belief in the ability of Jesus to act. But this story about faith is embedded in a narrative that portrays Jesus as uncaring and apathetic about the plight of the woman and her daughter, at least up until the last moment. In fact, it looks like Jesus changes his mind in response to the woman’s clever response to his offensive rhetoric. What do we make of it? 

The story we are considering today was taken up by the late Gail O’Day in a piece entitled “Surprised by Faith: Jesus and the Canaanite Woman” that appeared in the volume A Feminist Companion to Matthew.² O’Day was a biblical scholar who served as dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity from 2010 until just a few months before her death in 2018.³ In addition to her contribution to A Feminist Companion to Matthew, O’Day wrote many other works including a commentary on the Gospel of John for the Westminster Bible Companion series and cowrote with Lynn Huber the commentary on the book of Revelation for the Wisdom Commentary series. 

To begin with, O’Day acknowledges the troubling nature of the account, but urges her readers to consider that the difficulty it engenders is not peripheral to the story. She writes, “This portrait of Jesus’ intransigence and the impingement of the Gentile woman has been a stumbling block to many interpreters. There is a hesitancy to recognize either the mutability of Jesus or the powerful presence of the woman. Both, however, are central to the text” (p. 114, author’s emphasis). She then notes that there is something about how the story is constructed that aids us in interpreting it. “The text must…be read to see how it is constructed as well as how it communicates,” she writes. 

Next, O’Day points the readers to the story’s context, both thematic and geographical. At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus finds himself confronted by the Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem who accuse his disciples of breaking traditional norms surrounding ritual purity. Hardly amused by their antics, he manages to turn the tables on them and points out their own hypocrisy before, in vv. 10-20, offering his own explanation about what creates impurity in a person.⁴ In v. 21, the beginning of the present pericope, Jesus leaves for Tyre and Sidon – gentile territory. “The question of what is the source of defilement is thus put to the test by Jesus’ very actions,” writes O’Day (p. 115). By entering gentile spaces, there would have been a heightened risk of becoming impure. Moreover, as O’Day notes, the coupled “Tyre and Sidon” evoke the words of Israel’s prophets who often viewed the pair as sources of imminent danger and the receivers of divine judgment.⁵ “The significance of the names Tyre and Sidon would not be lost on either Matthew or his readers,” O’Day writes. 

With the stage set, the Canaanite woman appears on the scene. But why “Canaanite”? In Mark’s version of the story she is referred to as a Syrophoenician (Mark 7:26) The origin of the term is debated but was probably intended to distinguish those living in northern Syria from those living in southern Syria.⁶ As such, “Syrophoenician” is a term reflective of Jesus’s day. But Matthew has “Canaanite.” Why? For O’Day, the use of such nomenclature to describe the woman is in keeping with Matthew’s pairing of Tyre and Sidon in v. 21. The Evangelist is making use of Old Testament terminology to tell his story.⁷ She writes, “We may thus safely judge Matthew’s anachronistic use of ‘Canaanite’ to be an intentional narrative strategy to accentuate the distinctions between Jesus and the woman who approaches him. She is the enemy, not of his kind” (p. 116).⁸ This will help explain, then, Jesus’s initial reaction to her, a subject we will look at in the next episode. 

Before I close up shop, I want to alert you to some changes that have already happened and are, with this episode, happening to the podcast. For those who watched on YouTube the previous ten episodes, you will have noticed that they were more “live-action” (for lack of a better term). I decided to go this route so that people could engage more with the content, seeing quotations and references in real time. Those who listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other platforms wouldn’t have noticed. But that, for me, is a problem. And so, beginning with today’s episode, the full script – complete with citations – will be available on my website the moment of publication. If you’re curious about a quotation or would just like to read what I’m saying in addition to hearing it, you’ll be able to by going over to amateurexegete.com. I hope to make my content as helpful as possible, and I think these are steps in the right direction.

That’s all the time we’ve got this week. See you next time! And remember, in the words of Richard Elliot Friedman, “One does not need to deny what is troubling [about the Bible] in order to pay respect to what is heartening.” Thanks for stopping by.

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1. All quotations of biblical texts, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version. ↩︎
2. Gail R. O’Day, “Surprised by Faith: Jesus and the Canaanite Woman,” in A Feminist Companion to Matthew, edited by Amy-Jill Levine with Marianne Blickenstaff (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 114-125. ↩︎
3. Christian Century Staff, “New Testament and preaching scholar Gail O’Day dies at age 63” (10.24.18), christiancentury.org. Accessed 11.6.23. ↩︎
4. On this, see Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020), 187-195. Importantly, Thiessen argues that the Evangelists were not seeking to paint a picture of a Jesus who disavowed Jewish purity rituals but rather one that is emblematic of Jesus’s frequent disagreements with Pharisaical understandings of purity. In other words, this was an intra-Jewish debate, one that affirmed the purity system but disagreed on how to best maintain ritual purity.  ↩︎
5. E.g., Ezekiel 26-28.  ↩︎
6. Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia Commentary series (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 366. Cf. Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 462-463 ↩︎
7. Cf. R. Alan Culpepper, Matthew: A Commentary, The New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 295. ↩︎
8. Cf. W.D. Davies and D.C. Allison, Matthew 8-18, International Critical Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 1991), 656. ↩︎