Matthew 8:18-34, Let the dead bury their dead, the storm and Gadara

Burying a father was a son's highest duty, and Wright calls Jesus' answer "This is, quite frankly, outrageous." What the man asks for is debated. Keener notes that bones were gathered into an ossuary a year after death, so he "could thus be asking for as much as a year's delay"; Bailey, citing Middle Eastern commentators, takes to bury one's father as an idiom for staying home until the parents die, perhaps for years; Keener's notes mention both views. Matthew names Gadara, about six miles from the lake and much nearer than Mark's Gerasa (Keener). Wilkins puts Gadara about five miles southeast of the lake and takes Gerasa as the small lakeside village of Khersa or Kursi inside Gadara's region, the traditional site; Gadara's coins sometimes showed ships (the Zondervan archaeology handbook). Tombs were unclean and thought haunted, and before the time means before the day of judgment. The Mishnah released a man whose dead lay unburied from reciting the Shema, from prayer and from wearing phylacteries (m. Berakhot 3:1; Wilkins), which shows how far the duty to bury reached.