The Prodigal Son: What the Village Was Waiting For (19 of 26)

Bailey spent three books on this parable, and the reading that made his name rests on a village ceremony most people have never heard of.

It is also the part of his case that has taken the most fire, including from Bailey himself. So this post gives the reading, then shows exactly what it rests on, and then says what survives if the ceremony is taken off the table.

What Does Prodigal Actually Mean?

Recklessly wasteful. Extravagant, especially with money.

It comes from the Latin prodigus, lavish, from prodigere, to drive forth or squander. The word describes spending, and nothing else.

The common misreading is that it means wayward, or runaway, or returning. It does not. It says nothing about leaving home and nothing about coming back. A prodigal who never repents is still a prodigal.

The word can even run positive. Prodigal generosity. A prodigal harvest. Lavishly abundant, with no moral judgment attached at all.

So the label picks out one fact about one son: what he did with the money. That is a narrow thing to hang a chapter on.

Is the Title Even Part of the Bible?

No. It is an editorial section heading added by translators and editors, and it is not in the text.^[1]

Jesus opens differently. A certain man had two sons.

That is the parable’s own framing and it is doing something the title undoes. The story announces a father and two sons. The heading announces one son and his spending.

Follow where the story actually spends itself and the imbalance is obvious. The younger son’s collapse and return occupy the middle. The ending, the part a story reserves for what it is about, is given entirely to the older brother standing outside a party he will not enter, and to a father going out a second time to plead.

The parable does not resolve that. It stops with him outside.

So a title that fixes attention on the wasteful son sends readers past the thing the ending is for. It is not wrong, exactly. It is aimed at the wrong half.

Some traditions have noticed and renamed it, usually as the parable of the loving father or the parable of the two sons. Both are closer to what the text does.

What Was Wrong With the Request?

There are two requests, not one, and the second is the worse of them.

The Mishnah, compiled around AD 200 and the closest thing to the period of anything cited in this post, provides for the first. A father may divide his estate during his lifetime and assign shares to his sons, and it says plainly that he keeps the use of the property while he lives: he may pluck up the produce and feed it to whomsoever he will. The son gets title. The father keeps the income and the control.

That is the first request, and it is legally available. What follows is not. Within a few days the son converts his share to cash, which requires the right of disposal that the arrangement above specifically withholds. He is not asking for what the law allows a living father to give. He is taking the one thing that arrives only when the father dies.

So the implication people usually attach to the first request belongs to the second. And selling that fast, in the village, with the father alive and present, means taking whatever he could get in front of neighbours who now know exactly what has happened in that house. Land sales in that world ran for months. Ben Sirach calls slander by a whole town a terror worse than death, which gives some sense of what the family was living with afterwards.

Bailey put the case to people across the Middle East for fifteen years. Has anyone ever made such a request, could anyone make it, and what would happen. The answers came back the same: impossible, and his father would beat him. Out of hundreds of askings he got two positive answers. One was from a pastor in Iran whose leading parishioner said in anguish that his son wanted him to die. Three months later the father, previously in good health, was dead, and the mother said he died that night.^[2]

What Is the Qetsatsah, and How Solid Is the Evidence?

A cutting-off ceremony, and this is the part of the standard reading that needs handling carefully rather than repeating.

The ceremony itself is described clearly enough. If a man sold family land to a Gentile, his relatives filled a jar with parched corn and nuts, broke it in front of the village children, and the children gathered up the pieces and called out that so-and-so is cut off from his inheritance. Recovering the land undid it.

Three things have to be said about using it here.

The sources are late. The fullest description is in Ruth Rabbah, which Strack and Stemberger place in Palestine around AD 500, roughly five centuries after the parable, with supporting references in the Jerusalem Talmud. A late text can preserve an old custom, and often does. It cannot demonstrate one on its own.

Bailey does not claim what he is usually quoted as claiming. The strong version, that the parable is constructed on the ceremony, belongs to Karl Rengstorf, and in the technical book Bailey rejects it outright and says Rengstorf’s argument fails at the crucial point. His objection is a good one: when the son left, he had not yet sold to Gentiles, so there was nothing to trigger the ceremony at his departure. What Bailey keeps is weaker and more defensible. A man who returns home having lost family land among Gentiles is walking into a village with a known way of dealing with him, and the family would be under pressure to act.

Others go further and reject it entirely. Klyne Snodgrass says no evidence exists that the qetsatsah is even remotely in the background of the parable. Amy-Jill Levine presses the dating and adds a warning worth taking seriously on its own terms: a reading that requires the village to be uniquely hardhearted has turned a loving father into an intolerant Jewish father surrounded by bloodthirsty Jewish neighbours, and at that point exegesis has given way to stereotype. That test is worth keeping regardless of how the ceremony question lands.

So the honest statement is this. The ceremony is attested, the sources are late, the strong version was rejected by the man usually credited with it, and the weak version is an inference about village pressure rather than a documented legal procedure hanging over the road.

Why Does the Father Run?

To get to his son before the village does, and this survives whether or not a jar was ever going to be broken.

The undignified part is not in dispute. Running required gathering up the robes and exposing the legs, and it was not what an elder did in public. Ben Sirach says a man’s walk tells you what he is, and Aristotle has great men never running in public. Bailey’s own illustration is a pastor refused a church because the elders judged that he walked down the street too fast.

What the father is running toward matters as much as how he runs. The son has to cross the whole village to reach the house, and a crowd gathers the moment he is recognised at the edge of it. Ben Sirach lists the slander of a town and the gathering of a mob among the things that terrify him. The father runs that gauntlet first and brings the boy through it under his own visible protection. None of that requires a ceremony. It requires only a village that knows what happened, and everyone in the parable knows.

The kiss is the part usually read as affection and it is doing legal work. When a serious village quarrel is settled, a public kiss between the parties is part of the ceremony that ends it, performed in front of witnesses. Some commentators have read the kiss on the cheek as a claim that the two men are equals, and Bailey rejects that half: an Oriental father is never his son’s equal and would not say so in public. What the kiss does is prevent the son from kissing his father’s hand or feet, and announce to everyone watching that the quarrel is over. It happens before the son has said a word.

Is the Son’s Speech Repentance?

Bailey argues the rehearsed version is a proposal, and the wording supports him.

In the far country he plans to say: make me like one of your hired men. The Greek is not the word for a household slave or a table servant. It is the word for a paid craftsman.

That distinction is doing more work than it first appears. The older view, from Oesterley, put the hired man at the bottom of the estate hierarchy as an outsider with no stake in the place, which would make the plan an act of self-abasement. Joseph Heinemann’s work on labourers in the Tannaitic period argues the opposite: work and workers were held in high esteem, most of the rabbis of that period were themselves artisans and a good many were day labourers, the legal status was identical, and no difference in social standing shows up between a wage-earner and his employer.

So the plan is not humility. It is independence. A free man with his own income, living in the village, out from under his father’s authority, not eating his brother’s bread, and paying the money back on his own terms. He intends to confess a failure and then fix it himself, which is exactly the shape of repentance the religious system of the period taught: contrition, confession, and restitution, with the restitution as the indispensable part.

Then he arrives, and something happens to the speech. The best manuscript evidence has him leaving the last line off. He says he has sinned against heaven and before his father and is no longer worthy to be called a son, and he stops. The request to be made a hired man is not delivered. Every one of the Oriental versions omits it, and Ibn al-Tayyib, reading in Baghdad in the eleventh century, says the boy was determined to say it and did not, because of what he saw of his father’s love.^[3]

That reading and the interruption reading are both in play, since later manuscripts restore the line and the father’s orders do cut across the speech either way. But if the omission is original, the turning point of the parable is a sentence a man decided not to say.

What the father calls for instead is a robe, a ring and shoes. The best robe is his own, worn on feast days, which every listener would assume without being told. The ring is probably a signet, meaning trust. The shoes mark a free man of the household rather than a servant, and the servants putting them on his feet is their acceptance of him as their master.

Notice what accepting that costs him. Under his own plan he keeps his pride and settles the debt. As a son he lives with his brother, eats from his brother’s inheritance, returns under his father’s authority, and never gets the satisfaction of having earned his way back. Sonship is the harder option, not the easier one.

What Is the Older Brother’s Failure?

It happened at the beginning, not the end.

In that culture a serious breach in a family produces a mediator, and the elder son was the obvious candidate. When the outrageous request was made, he said nothing. He also accepted his own share in silence rather than refusing it in protest at what the request implied.

He had a role to play at the start of the story and declined it twice. Which makes his complaint at the end considerably less sympathetic than it first sounds, because the party he refuses to enter is celebrating a reconciliation he could have brokered years earlier. Ibrahim Sa’id’s reading is that the younger brother was estranged while absent from the house and the older was estranged inside it, and he uses the strongest word Arabic has for a man who has left family, country and religion.

Is the Prodigal Son About Israel’s Return From Exile?

Wright reads it that way, and the case rests on one repeated line.^[4]

This son of mine was dead and is alive again. From Ezekiel 37 onward, resurrection language had been doing service in Israel’s Scriptures as a picture of coming home from exile. And most of Jesus’s contemporaries reckoned the exile had never actually ended. The people were back in the land, the temple stood and Herod was in the middle of enlarging it, and pagans still ran the country. What they were waiting for was a second Exodus.

Tell that audience a story about a son who lost everything in a foreign country and came home to a feast, and they are not hearing a family drama.

Which gives the parable a second answer to the muttering that opens the chapter. The first answer is that heaven throws a party when the lost are found. The second is that the promises are being kept in front of the people complaining about it, and a man who objects to the celebration is objecting to the arrival of his own hope.

This is Wright’s reading rather than something the parable states, and it depends on the exile framework being as widely held as he takes it to be. That framework is well attested in the period, though how far it reached is argued over.

Why Does the Older Brother Say He Has Never Disobeyed?

Because that was the boast, and Wright hears a particular voice making it.

I have never disobeyed a single command of yours is the same claim Paul makes about his own past in Philippians 3:6, where he says that as to righteousness under the law he was blameless. The older son is speaking in the register of the men standing in front of Jesus while the story is being told.

There is money underneath it too. The father divided the property at the start, which means the older son has been working his own share ever since, so the complaint about slaving away is not accurate. His real objection may be arithmetic. The younger brother has already spent his portion, and anything killed and served now comes out of what remains, which belongs to the son standing in the field.

The pronouns shift while he talks. The servant tells him his brother has come home. He tells his father that this son of yours has come home. The father answers with this brother of yours, and hands the word back to him.

And there is a line in the father’s answer that cuts against the usual reading of the whole scene. You are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. If the older son stands for the scribes and Pharisees, that is a remarkably generous thing for the parable to say about them, and Snodgrass presses it as an argument for the story being authentic: no early Christian writing back into the tradition would have put those words in the father’s mouth.

Wright also notes where Luke is aiming this. By the time the Gospel was written, Gentiles were arriving in the church and Jewish believers were finding the celebration difficult, which is the pastoral problem Paul spends three chapters of Romans managing. The parable stops with the older brother outside, and Luke’s readers had their own version of him.

How Does the Parable of the Prodigal Son End?

Outside, unresolved, with the father in the field again.^[5]

The elder son refuses to come in, which is a public insult of the same order as the younger son’s request. At a feast of that kind the older son has a semi-official role, moving among the guests, directing the servants, checking that everyone has enough. His absence is not private sulking. It is a scene staged where the whole village can watch it.

And the father does the same thing twice in one day. He goes out to a son who has shamed him, in front of guests, and pleads.

The story stops there. We are never told whether he goes in.

Luke 15 opened with religious men muttering that this man welcomes sinners and eats with them. The parable ends with a religious man standing outside a meal he will not join, being begged by his father to come and eat.

The question is left with the audience, and the audience was the older brothers.

Which is why the title matters more than it looks. Call it the prodigal son and the reader arrives expecting a story about a young man who wasted money, gets one, and leaves satisfied before the parable has made its point. The man Jesus was actually describing to the Pharisees was standing in a field, refusing to go in.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the lost sheep and the lost coin, which open the same chapter, and Lazarus and the rich man, which closes on the same words.

Footnotes5

1. Section headings across the Bible are worth treating as what they are, which is editorial furniture rather than text. They were added to help readers navigate and they carry interpretive decisions made by whoever added them. This is one of the clearest cases, but it is not the only one, and a reader who has never noticed that the headings are not scripture has been quietly guided by them for years.
2. Bailey's fifteen-year survey is worth naming rather than compressing into a flat cultural claim, because the sourcing is the point. Two positive answers out of hundreds of askings is a result, and it is a more honest basis for the reading than an unattributed statement about what Middle Eastern fathers would do. It is also field observation from the twentieth century rather than evidence from the first, and it carries the limits that go with that.
3. The omitted line is the most consequential textual variant in the parable and almost no English reader ever hears about it. If the shorter reading is original, the son changes his plan in the middle of delivering it, and the change is caused by something he saw rather than something he was told. Later manuscripts restore the line, which is exactly what a copyist would do when a rehearsed speech and its delivery do not match.
4. The exile reading and the village reading are not rivals, and they answer different questions. Bailey explains why the father's run works on the people watching. Wright explains why the story lands on the men who were complaining. Neither requires the other, and a teacher can run the parable on either one.
5. The parable's refusal to resolve is deliberate and it should be preserved in any retelling. A version that has the older brother come in has answered the question the parable was asking its listeners, and taken it out of their hands.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, combined edition 1983), chapter 7. Supports the two-request structure and the Mishnah ruling behind it, the fifteen-year survey and the Iranian case, the rejection of Rengstorf's qetsatsah thesis, the running and its cultural cost, the kiss as a public act of reconciliation rather than a claim of equality, the Oesterley and Heinemann dispute over the hired man's standing, the omitted line and Ibn al-Tayyib's explanation of it, and the robe, ring and shoes. In print, and in Logos.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Finding the Lost: Cultural Keys to Luke 15 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1992), and The Cross and the Prodigal (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2005). The popular treatments of the same material. Supplied in full.

N. T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (London: SPCK, and Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), on Luke 15:11-24 and Luke 15:25-32. Supports the return-from-exile reading, the parallel between the older son's boast and Phil 3:6, the observation that the property was already divided, the shifting pronouns, and the forward reference to Gentile inclusion in Luke's own church. Supplied in full.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 2nd edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018). States that no evidence exists for the qetsatsah standing behind the parable, and presses the father's line about all that is mine is yours as an argument for authenticity. In print.

Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperOne, 2014). The dating objection to the qetsatsah and the warning about readings that require the village to be uniquely hardhearted. In print.

Mishnah, Baba Batra 8:7, on a father assigning shares during his lifetime while retaining the use of the property. Compiled c. AD 200. The complete Soncino Talmud, which carries the Mishnah text, is free in full at halakhah.com.

Midrash Rabbah on Ruth 7:11, with the Jerusalem Talmud, Ketuboth 2:10 and Kiddushin 1:5. The sources describing the qetsatsah. Ruth Rabbah is dated to Palestine around AD 500 by Strack and Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, 2nd English edition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).

Joseph Heinemann, on the status of labourers in the Tannaitic period, and W. O. E. Oesterley, on the estate hierarchy. Both cited in Bailey.

Ibn al-Tayyib, eleventh-century Baghdad physician, monk and biblical commentator, and Ibrahim Sa'id, Egyptian commentator. Both cited in Bailey. Neither has been translated into English, so Bailey is the only route to either.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 15:11-32, Ezek 37, Phil 3:6, and Sirach 26:5.

Where the sourcing stops: the qetsatsah section states its own limits rather than relying on this note. The strong version of the reading is Rengstorf's and Bailey rejects it; the weak version is Bailey's inference about village pressure and is not a documented procedure. The return-from-exile reading is Wright's inference about what the first hearers would have heard rather than a claim the parable makes about itself. The link between the older son's boast and Philippians 3:6 is a parallel of wording, not a citation by either author. Whether the shorter reading of the son's speech is original is a textual judgment and the post gives both possibilities. Bailey's survey and his field observations are twentieth-century evidence about a first-century scene and carry the limits that go with that. The etymology of prodigal is standard and checkable in any dictionary; the argument about what the editorial heading does to a reader's attention is mine.