The Amateur Exegete

Bible Study for Amateurs #64 – Crumbs from the Table, part 4

In the last three episodes we’ve looked at the late Gail O’Day’s piece entitled “Surprised by Faith: Jesus and the Canaanite Woman” that appeared in the volume A Feminist Companion to Matthew.1 (Be sure to check out those episodes if you haven’t already.) In the last episode, we looked at psalms of lament, specifically Psalm 13 which she described as “a succinct example of the basic lament form” (p. 120). O’Day identified five parts common to psalms of lament: (1) an address to God; (2) the registering of a complaint; (3) a petition for God to act; (4) giving of motivations for why the deity would want to act; (5) imprecations. Having discussed these features in the context of Psalm 13, she moves on to section 4 of her piece: “The Lament Psalm as an Act of Faith.” She writes, “We are now ready to look at Mt. 15.21-28, and in particular the Canaanite woman’s words, against the backdrop of Israel’s psalms of lament” (p. 121). 

O’Day begins with the words of the woman herself, found in vv. 22, 25, and 27. Here they are as they appear in the New Revised Standard Version: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon” (v. 22); “Lord, help me” (v. 25); “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat crumbs that fall from the masters’ table” (v. 27).2 Next, she compares her words to the elements found within psalms of lament. With the words “Have mercy on me” in v. 22 and “Help me” in v. 25 we have petition. By referring to Jesus as “Lord” and “Son of David” we have the address. When she tells Jesus of her daughter’s condition in v. 22 we find the complaint. And in v. 27 with its language of dogs eating the crumbs that fall from the masters’ table we find the motivation. “What we discover,” writes O’Day, “is that the woman’s words are, in essence, a short lament psalm. Matthew has shaped her words to reflect the traditional, candid speech of Jews before their God” (p. 122). 

Before we continue, we should perhaps investigate (if only briefly) Jesus’s initial reactions to the woman. For example, v. 23 reports that upon hearing the woman’s plea Jesus “did not answer her at all.” And when the disciples urge him to send her away because she was shouting at them, his reply is, per v. 24, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And finally, in response to her begging, he says in v. 26, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” This Jesus certainly doesn’t seem like the one you find in Sunday Schools around the world: “Jesus loves me, this I know,” or even “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world!” This Jesus was happy to let this woman’s daughter suffer at the hands of a demon, all because she wasn’t, to use his words, of “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But what does that phrase even mean? In their commentary on Matthew, W.D. Davies and Dale Allison list four options.3

The first is that by “the house of Israel” Jesus was referring to a spiritual Israel, an idea rejected out of hand by Davies and Allison: “[N]othing in Matthew justifies anything save an ethnic understanding of ‘Israel’,” they write.4 Another option is that the phrase refers to the ten lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom, the victims of Assyria centuries prior. But given what we read in Matthew 10:5-6, the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” are located squarely in Jewish territory, not gentile. A third possibility is that Jesus was committed to ministering to just a subset of Israel, “the lost.” Everyone else, apparently, was just fine. This feels like a very strained reading. The fourth option is that the phrase just refers to the nation as a whole. Davies and Allison write, “The most popular and surely most credible interpretation has it that ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ was intended by Matthew to characterize the Jewish nation as a whole. It was by and large lost (with the emphasis probably not on sinfulness but lack of leadership).”5

If this is the case, then Jesus’s reaction begins to make sense. His mission was not to minister to non-Jews but to his own people. This doesn’t alleviate the problem of Jesus’s apparent callousness, but it does give us a glimpse into why he behaves as he does. And it’s the juxtaposition of the earnestness of the Canaanite woman and the callousness of Jesus that makes this story so compelling. Despite being rebuffed, she persists, so much so that even the disciples want her gone! 

In v. 26, Jesus responds to the woman’s request for aid with a maxim of sorts: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” One does not need to be a non-Jew of the first century to see how deeply offensive such language is. In his commentary on Matthew, R. Alan Culpepper notes that dogs were often considered unclean and to call someone a dog was an insult.6 It is interesting that in Mark’s version Jesus’s response is prefaced with the words “Let the children be fed first” (Mark 7:27). In this way, the Evangelist somewhat softens the blow of the derisive language. But Matthew omits this, “making Jesus’s reply all the more stark,” to quote Grant Osborne.7

Jesus ignored the Canaanite woman, refused to help because she was not a Jew, and now likens her to a dog. Wouldn’t it be time for her to pack it up and head home? For some, this would surely be the time to read the writing on the wall, but not for her. She has a clever and convincing retort to Jesus that causes him to grant what she wishes. That is what we will look at in the next episode.

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.

  1. 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. ↩︎
  2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version. ↩︎
  3. W.D. Davies and D.C. Allison, Matthew 8-18, International Critical Commentary (London: T&T Clark,1991), 551.  ↩︎
  4. Davies and Allison, Matthew 8-18, 551. ↩︎
  5. Davies and Allison, Matthew 8-18, 551. ↩︎
  6. R. Alan Culpepper, Matthew: A Commentary, The New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 296. ↩︎
  7. Grant R. Osborne, Matthew, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 599. ↩︎
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