The Parable of the Talents Explained (2 of 26)

This is the parable most often preached as a motivational speech about using your gifts, and it is the parable that least supports one.

A man is condemned for keeping money safe. The master he was afraid of never denies what the man said about him. And the closing line hands more to those who already have plenty and strips the last thing from the one who has nothing.

Those are the difficulties. They are in the text, they are not solved by ignoring them, and a reading that does not feel them has not finished.

What Happens in the Parable of the Talents?

A man going on a journey entrusts his property to three slaves, five talents, two, and one, each according to ability.

The first two trade and double what they were given. The third digs a hole and buries his.

The master returns and settles accounts. The first two are commended in identical words and invited into his celebration. The third explains himself, is condemned, has his talent transferred to the man with ten, and is thrown outside into the dark where there is weeping and grinding of teeth.

How Much Is a Talent Worth in the Bible?

Enormous. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty years of a labourer’s wages, and the spread between those two figures is worth understanding rather than picking one.

A talent was six thousand denarii, and a denarius was a day’s pay. So the arithmetic is six thousand days whichever estimate you follow. Divide by a full calendar year and you get about sixteen. Divide by the days a man could actually work, once sabbaths and festivals are taken out, and you get about twenty. N. T. Wright says fifteen years. The ESV Study Bible and Klyne Snodgrass say twenty. Neither is wrong; they are dividing by different denominators.

That range matters, because the parable is routinely preached as though it were about small personal aptitudes. Even the third slave, the one with the least, is holding more than most people in the audience would see in a lifetime.

Our English word talent, meaning an ability, comes from this parable. That is worth knowing and it is also the source of most of the misreading. The word did not mean ability when Jesus used it. It meant a weight of silver.^[1]

Does the Master Agree With the Third Servant’s Excuse?

He does not deny it, and that is the difficulty.

The servant says he knew the master was a hard man who reaps where he did not sow and profits from investments he never made, and that he was afraid.

The master’s reply does not dispute the description. It begins by repeating it back as established: so you knew that I reap where I did not sow.

If this parable is a straightforward allegory in which the master is God, then a condemned man has just characterised God as an extractor and God has let it stand. Most sermons walk past that. Two of the books this series leans on do not, and I did not have either of them in the first version of this post.

Kenneth Bailey’s reading changed my mind about what the servant is doing. He works from Luke’s version, but the speech is the same in both. A servant who has just failed his master’s test is not going to insult him to his face on purpose, so the speech must be meant as a compliment, and in the right culture it would be one. Cicero says the Gauls thought it disgraceful to grow grain by hand and went out armed to reap other men’s fields; Bailey quotes a Talmudic story in which David sends Israel out in troops to plunder the enemy for their sustenance. Reaping where you did not sow is high praise for a raider and an insult to a nobleman in a settled farming community, which is what this master is and where Jesus and his hearers came from. The servant, in Bailey’s phrase, has critically misjudged his master, and in trying to compliment him he insults him.

That reframes the master’s reply. Bailey reads “you knew” as “you experienced me as”: the master does not admit that he is a hard man, he says that this is how the servant experienced him, and the judgment that follows is to leave the servant with that view. Bailey’s image is a pair of blue sunglasses that the servant’s unfaithfulness put on him; the sentence is that he keeps them. Bailey sets Ps 18:25-26 beside it: with the loyal you show yourself loyal, and with the crooked you show yourself twisted. He also notices that the master catches the servant in an inconsistency. A real robber baron would have been glad of interest from a bank and unbothered by the law against it. The bank line is the master pointing out that the servant’s own picture of him does not explain the servant’s own behaviour.

Snodgrass is more cautious and lands in the same place. The servant’s description of the master as harsh, he says, is not supported by the master’s actions with the first two servants and is not affirmed in the narrative; the servant’s own words are merely the basis on which he is judged. The only evidence for the charge is the man making it, and the story has just shown the same master handing two other men everything he owned and then inviting them into his joy.

So the difficulty is real and it has an answer. The master never says the servant was right about him. What he says is that even on the servant’s own account, the servant’s behaviour made no sense.

Was Burying the Money Irresponsible?

More than the first version of this post allowed, and for a reason the usual argument misses.

The rabbinic rule is that a man holding money in trust who buried it and lost it anyway was not liable, because he had taken the recognised precaution. Wrapping it in a cloth was the negligent option. Burial was the safe one.

Two things should be said about that before it is used. The rule appears in the Babylonian Talmud, compiled somewhere around AD 500 to 600, so it is being read back across four or five centuries onto a first-century scene.^[2] And Snodgrass and Blomberg both point out that the rule governs a deposit, money handed over for safekeeping, which is not what happens here. This master hands the money over to be traded with. The third slave is not a bailee who chose the cautious option; he is a trader who declined to trade.

Snodgrass is firmer about it than I was in the first version, and I think he is right to be. Attempts to suggest that the first hearers would have identified with the third servant or seen him as taking a commendable safe course, he says, will not work. The money was not left for safekeeping; everyone would have assumed the servants were to use it to make a profit, or “to each according to his ability” in Matt 25:15 would make no sense. Luke’s explicit command to do business only makes explicit what Matthew’s hearers would have assumed anyway. Blomberg allows that the servant might have been seen as prudent, then draws the same line: the law spoke only of safeguarding a trust, not of money meant for investment, so the behaviour was probably rather foolish.

Bailey adds a motive. In Luke’s version the nobleman has known enemies, and Bailey thinks the third servant was less afraid of his master than afraid the master would not come back, in which case he would have backed the wrong horse. Burying the money was hedging. Matthew has no enemies in the story, so the point transfers only in part, but the shape of it does: the man was not paralysed, he made a calculation about his master and acted on it.

So I have to give up more of the first version than I would like. Burying was the recognised precaution for a deposit, and this was never a deposit, which leaves the man not prudent by any standard the story recognises. What survives is the narrower claim. He was not lazy in the ordinary sense; he read his master, acted on the reading, and the reading was wrong.

Whatever the parable is teaching, it is still not teaching ordinary financial caution, because caution is what got the man thrown out.

What Was the Master Looking For When He Settled Accounts?

Faithfulness, not returns.

Bailey asks whether the parable needs to be liberated from the presuppositions of capitalism that have quietly shaped the way Westerners translate it, and his test case is Luke’s word for what the master asks on his return, diepragmateusanto, which occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. Its primary meaning is how much business has been transacted, not how much has been gained. The Syriac, Coptic and most Arabic versions chose the first sense. A master asking what was gained wants to see the money. A master asking how much business was done wants to know how openly his servants traded in his name while he was away. A full ledger means the whole town knew whose men they were.

That is Luke’s verb and Matthew does not use it, but Matthew makes the same point another way. The five-talent man and the two-talent man are commended in identical words, good and faithful servant, and given the same reward. Blomberg draws the consequence: the second is no less faithful than the first and gets no extra talent, which rules out building a doctrine of graded rewards on this passage. The master is not grading returns. Bailey notes that the servants in Luke report your pound produced ten, not my hard work achieved this; that the master commends them for being faithful, not successful; and that the reward is more responsibility, not a pension or a villa by the sea. In Matthew it is being set over much.

Is the Third Servant in the Talents the Hero?

A minority reading says yes, and it deserves stating properly rather than being brushed aside.

On that reading the master is what the servant says, a hard man extracting wealth he did not produce, and the two who doubled his money did so by participating in the same extraction. The third refuses. He hands back exactly what he was given, having taken nothing and produced nothing at anyone’s expense, and he tells the master to his face what he is. The parable then describes what such systems do to people who will not play.

It is not a foolish reading. It takes the servant’s description of the master seriously, and the master’s silence about it, which most readings do not, and it fits a pattern where Jesus tells stories with unsavoury central figures.

I had Snodgrass in the first version as raising the question of whether the hearers would have sided with the third servant. He does more than raise it; he rejects it. The reading is, in his words, more a usurpation of the parable than an interpretation. If it is a warning about mistreating the poor it is cryptic in the extreme. Hearers would hardly identify with the third servant and his fear, and hiding the money is hardly defiance of an oppressive system.

The difficulty is placement. Matthew has set this inside a run of parables about the master’s return and readiness for it, following the ten virgins and preceding the sheep and the goats, and every one of those has the returning figure as the one who judges rightly. Reading this one against that grain requires the surrounding chapter to be doing something different from what it appears to be doing.

I do not hold the minority reading. I do think anyone teaching this parable should know it exists and be able to say why they reject it, because the observation driving it, that the master never denies the charge, is a real observation about the text. Bailey’s answer to it is above.

What Do the Talents Represent?

N. T. Wright argues it is about Israel’s leadership rather than about personal productivity. I find the case strong, and it has a serious opponent, which I will come to.

A story about a master who goes away, leaves slaves with responsibilities, and comes back to settle accounts would have been heard in that period as a story about God and Israel. Luke plainly intends his version that way.

Read like that, the parable sits with Matt 23, where Jesus has just spent a chapter denouncing the scribes and Pharisees. They are the third slave. What had they been given? The law, the temple, the promises that Israel would carry blessing to the whole world.

And they buried it. The command to be a light to the nations became a reason to keep the light. Wright reads the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the temple as the accounting in the story.

The other two, then, are those who take what Israel was given and let it become something new, which is the mustard seed growing large from a small beginning.

That reading has the advantage of explaining why the parable is where it is, in the last week, in Jerusalem, days before the confrontation.

Snodgrass does not accept it, and his objection is the one that has to be answered. The reading goes back to Dodd and Jeremias, who took the parable as told against the Jewish leaders, and Snodgrass says it has been influential but has little in its favour. His first question: if the third servant mirrors the leaders who were entrusted with the law, whom do the first two servants reflect? A parable aimed at one unfaithful group could have had one servant. His second is that the scribes and Pharisees cannot be accused of burying their deposit or of being lazy; they were continually and assiduously engaged in teaching the law and extending its reach, which is what Matt 23:15 says about them. He thinks both versions were addressed to disciples, or at least to people who had already responded to Jesus, and that the master mirrors Jesus rather than God, holding his followers to account for what they do with the kingdom in his absence. On Wright’s handling of Luke he adds two more questions: if the nobleman who goes to receive a kingdom is God, from whom does he receive it, and can a parable warn of imminent judgment if the judgment does not arrive for forty years?

Wright’s answer to the first question is above: the first two servants are those who took what Israel was given and let it become something new. Snodgrass would call that an answer supplied from outside the story, and he has a point. I still hold Wright’s reading, mainly because of where Matthew has put the parable, but a reader should know that the most thorough recent commentary on the parables rejects it, and why.

Does the Parable of the Talents Make God Look Harsh?

The parable does not answer that, and the caution is the most important thing to carry away from it.

A parable is not a complete portrait of God. This one makes a specific argument about a specific accountability at a specific moment, and reading it as a general statement about the divine character produces exactly the religion Jesus spent his ministry attacking, where God runs an examination system and people are sorted by their marks.

Snodgrass makes the point in a rule that covers this whole class of difficulty. Parables use hyperbole and surprise, and a detail inside one is not a doctrinal statement. God does not have torturers, and neither should anyone conclude from this parable that God reaps where he did not sow.

Everything else in the Gospel cuts against that. He came for the sick rather than the healthy, for sinners rather than the righteous, and he told the religious leadership that tax collectors and prostitutes were going in ahead of them. None of those people would have passed an exam.

Wright adds the observation that should close any treatment of this parable. Notice where it sits. A few chapters later the Son of Man gives his life as a ransom for many. And when Jesus speaks of a man thrown into the outer darkness, he is himself walking toward the darkness where he will cry out that God has abandoned him.

The one who tells the story about the servant cast out is on his way to being cast out.

Is the Ending of the Parable of the Talents Unfair?

The closing line is the part people mean: to everyone who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.

Read as a rule about wealth or ability it is monstrous. Read as a description of what happens to entrusted responsibility that is never exercised, it is closer to an observation than a policy. Unused capacity atrophies. A gift never risked eventually stops being available.

That does not remove the sting and it is not meant to. But the sentence is doing different work in a parable about stewardship of a commission than it would in a lecture about the distribution of goods.

How Do the Talents and the Pounds Differ?

It is a different parable and it is harsher, and treating the two as one flattens both.^[3]

Snodgrass puts a number on the distance. The two accounts share only about fifty of roughly three hundred words, which is far too little to be two tellings of one story. They are related in shape and unrelated in text.

In Luke 19 the figure is a nobleman travelling to a far country to receive a kingdom. His own citizens send a delegation after him saying they will not have this man rule over them. The amounts are minas rather than talents, a far smaller sum. And the parable ends with the returning king ordering that the enemies who opposed his reign be brought and slaughtered in front of him.

That ending has no counterpart in Matthew.

Luke’s version also has a historical hook the first hearers would have caught. When Herod the Great died, his son Archelaus travelled to Rome to have his kingship confirmed, and a Jewish delegation followed him there to argue against it. Jesus tells this parable on the road to Jerusalem, and Jericho, where Luke sets it, had a palace Archelaus had rebuilt.

So Luke’s telling reaches for a story about a hated claimant to a throne, told by a man about to be acclaimed and then executed as a king.

That version has its own post, the parable of the pounds, because the differences run deep enough to make it a separate story rather than a variant.

What Should You Take From the Parable of the Talents?

Drop the idea that talent means aptitude. That is an accident of English derived from this parable, and preaching it back into the parable inverts the meaning.

Drop the notion that the third slave was lazy or careless, and drop the notion that he was prudent. Burying was the recognised precaution for a deposit, and this was never a deposit. His failure was not incompetence, it was that he read his master as an extractor, tried to flatter him with a raider’s compliment, and handled a commission as though it were a deposit.

Keep the difficulty about the master, and keep the answer with it. The description is never denied, and the parable does not explain it, but the master’s actions with the other two men contradict it and his reply turns the servant’s own picture of him against him. Naming that openly is better than smoothing it, and a reader who has noticed it and been told nothing has reason to distrust the rest.

And keep the setting. This is told in the last week, in Jerusalem, to people who had been given a great deal and had, on Jesus’s assessment, buried it.

Part of a series working through the parables one at a time. See the Life of Jesus timeline for where this falls in the final week.

Footnotes3

1. The English word talent meaning ability comes from this parable and from nothing else. That is a rare case of a text generating a word and then being reread through the word it generated, and the reread version teaches close to the opposite of the original, since it makes the parable about what you are naturally good at rather than about what you have been entrusted with.
2. The dating problem here is worth stating rather than hiding, because it cuts both ways. The rule about burying a deposit is late, and so is the rabbinic material usually cited against it. Neither side of that argument has a first-century source, and a reading that needs the rule to be first-century practice is resting on more than the evidence carries.
3. That Matthew and Luke tell related but genuinely different versions is worth more attention than it usually gets. The differences are not the sort that harmonise easily, and the slaughter at the end of Luke's is not a detail Matthew softened. They are doing different jobs.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 16-28 (London: SPCK, 2002), on Matt 25:14-30. Supports the reading of the parable as addressed to Israel's leadership, the connection to Matt 23, the closing observation about where the parable sits in the narrative, and the derivation of the English word. Wright gives the talent as roughly fifteen years of a labourer's wages. Snodgrass's objections to the Israel reading are set out in the post. Supplied in full.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 31, "The Parable of the Pounds". Bailey is reading Luke's version, and the post says so where it borrows from him. Supports the reading of the third servant's speech as a compliment in the wrong culture, with Cicero on the Gauls reaping other men's fields and the Talmudic story of David sending Israel out to plunder; the reading of "you knew" as "you experienced me as", with Ps 18:25-26; the master's exposure of the servant's inconsistency over the bank; the servant's fear that the master would not return; diepragmateusanto as business transacted rather than profit gained, with the Syriac, Coptic and Arabic versions; the servants' reports as "your pound produced"; the master commending them for being faithful, not successful; and reward as responsibility rather than privilege. In print, and in Logos.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, 2nd edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), "The Talents and the Minas". Supports the twenty-year figure for the talent; the fifty-of-three-hundred word overlap between Matthew and Luke; the argument that the rabbinic burial texts govern money left for safekeeping and that attempts to see the third servant as taking a commendable safe course will not work, since "to each according to his ability" in Matt 25:15 presumes the money was to be used; the judgment that the servant's description of the master is not supported by the master's actions with the first two servants and is not affirmed in the narrative; the rejection of the third-servant-as-hero reading as a usurpation of the parable; the objections to the Dodd, Jeremias and Wright reading (whom do the first two servants reflect; the leaders were assiduous, Matt 23:15; the master mirrors Jesus rather than God; the questions about Luke's nobleman and the forty-year gap); and the rule that a detail inside a parable is not a doctrinal statement. In print.

Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992). Supports the same deposit distinction. In print, and in Logos.

Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012), section on the Talents. Supports the point that the second servant is no less faithful than the first and gets no extra talent, so no doctrine of graded rewards can be built on the passage, and the judgment that the law commending burial spoke only of safeguarding a trust, so the third servant's behaviour was probably rather foolish. In print, and in Logos.

ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), note on Matt 25:15. The twenty-year figure, reached by dividing six thousand denarii by working days rather than calendar days. In print, and in Logos.

Babylonian Talmud, Baba Metzia 42a, on burying money entrusted for safekeeping. The complete Soncino translation is free in full at halakhah.com. Compiled c. AD 500 to 600, which is the reason the post gives the date rather than presenting the rule as first-century practice.

Cicero, The Republic, on the Gauls reaping other men's fields, and the Babylonian Talmud's story of David and the harp. Both quoted through Bailey; I have not gone to the originals for this post.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 25:14-30, Matt 25:15, Matt 23:15, Luke 19:11-27 and Ps 18:25-26.

Where the sourcing stops: the Archelaus connection to Luke's version is widely noted and is an inference about what the first hearers would recognise rather than something Luke states. The minority reading of the third servant is described here rather than attributed to a particular scholar, since it circulates more in teaching than in print; Snodgrass names Rohrbaugh and Herzog as its academic holders. Bailey's material on the "hard man" speech, the master's reply and the settling of accounts comes from his chapter on Luke's parable of the pounds, and I have carried it over to Matthew where the wording is shared and said so where it is not. The first version of this post said the third servant was condemned for prudence and that Snodgrass merely raised the question of the hearers' sympathy; both are corrected above. The reading of the closing line as a description of atrophied capacity rather than a policy is my own.