Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
Mark 5:21-43, A synagogue leader's daughter and a bleeding woman
On the way to heal Jairus' dying daughter, Jesus is touched by a woman who has bled for twelve years. Then he raises the girl.
Mark 5:21-43, in every translation this tool compares.
Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, falls at Jesus' feet and begs him to come. In the crowd a woman who has bled for twelve years touches his cloak and is healed, and Jesus stops to find her. News comes that the girl has died; Jesus goes in past the mourners, takes her hand and raises her.
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/synagogue\/","n":"The synagogue","s":"The local gathering place where Jews met on the Sabbath to pray and study Scripture. It was also a community center, run by people of standing.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/unclean-by-touch\/","n":"Unclean by touch","s":"Under the law, skin disease, bleeding, corpses, tombs and certain animals made a person ritually unclean, and touch could pass it on.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/burial-and-mourning\/","n":"Burial and mourning","s":"Mourners came at once, the dead were buried the same day, wrapped in linen in rock tombs, and family carried the duty of burial. Pagan mourning, with little hope beyond a shadowy underworld, could be bleak.","r":""}
Keener notes that Jesus speaks to the girl in Aramaic, the mother tongue of most Galileans, and that at twelve she was near the usual minimum age for a girl's marriage; tomb inscriptions often mourned those who died too young to marry. He adds that the woman's condition had probably kept her from marriage or ended it. Keener notes that the woman had been brushing against people in the crowd all along. Garland lists the folk cures the Talmud records for a flow of blood and notes that only the wealthy could afford physicians. The Theodotus inscription from Jerusalem names a synagogue ruler whose father and grandfather held the same office (the Zondervan archaeology handbook).
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Mark 5:22, 5:25, 5:26, 5:27, 5:38, 5:39, 5:41 and 5:42
- N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone, comment on Mark 5:21-34
- ESV Study Bible, study note on Mark 5:41
- David E. Garland, Mark, in Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary, ed. Clinton E. Arnold, on Mark 5:26
- J. Randall Price and H. Wayne House, Zondervan Handbook of Biblical Archaeology, Mark 5:35 Ruler of the Synagogue (Theodotus Inscription)
