The Ten Bridesmaids: Why They Would Not Share (16 of 26)

The refusal is the problem.

Five young women have oil and five do not, and the ones with oil say no. Coming from a teacher who told people to give their cloak away and lend expecting nothing back, that answer looks wrong.

The explanation is not that generosity has limits. It is that some things cannot be transferred.

Were They Carrying Lamps or Torches?

The Greek will carry either, and translations split on it.

The word is lampas. In John 18:3 the party arresting Jesus carries lampades into a garden at night, and those are plainly torches. Here most English versions render it lamps, and the ESV notes the alternative.

Bailey works from small clay lamps, which is what he watched village women carry, held up in front of the face so everyone can see who is walking past rather than held low to light the ground. A man can cross a village at night without one. An unmarried woman moving through the streets unlit is another matter, so the lamp is reputation as much as illumination.

The torch reading puts a rag-wrapped pole in their hands instead, dipped in oil and burning for a short stretch before it needs replenishing.

Nothing in the argument below depends on settling it, and the torch reading arguably sharpens the point rather than weakening it, since a torch runs out faster than a lamp does. Either way the flask of reserve oil is the hinge, and either way all ten women are behaving properly. The only difference between them is what they brought.

What Is Actually Being Refused?

Not a commodity, on Bailey’s reading, but a state of preparation.

Believers borrow from each other constantly and are supposed to. What cannot be lent is a person’s own readiness for the kingdom. Commitment, and the discipleship that follows it, are not property. Nobody can hand another person their own years of preparation.

Read that way the wise are not being stingy. They are stating a fact. Even if they emptied their flasks, the thing actually needed could not change hands, and both groups would then be caught short.

Why Ten Women Rather Than Two Men?

Because the choice is deliberate, and the eleventh-century Syrian commentator Ibn al-Tayyib gives an answer worth having.

Notice the story immediately before this one in Matthew. A master and two male servants, one faithful and one not. Two men. Then this parable arrives with ten women.

Ibn al-Tayyib observes that in the Gospels the church is consistently feminine, the bride of Christ, so women are the fitting characters to represent the membership of the church, wise and foolish alike.

He then notes the number. Ten Jewish men formed the quorum for Passover, and he understood ten males to be required for a valid wedding. The parable supplies ten women instead, which Bailey reads as Jesus deliberately compensating for the gender gap in the religious practice of his day.

Whether one accepts every step of that, the structural point stands. The parable could have used men and did not.

What Does the Delay Mean?

That the wait would be longer than anyone planned for, and that planning is the whole difference.

The bridegroom is delayed and all ten fall asleep. That detail matters because it removes the obvious moral. The wise are not distinguished by staying awake. Everyone sleeps.^[1]

The difference was made hours earlier, when five of them thought about how long the night might be and brought reserves.

The delay itself is ordinary rather than mysterious. The groom collects the bride from her family’s house and the party walks the longest route back, wandering as many streets as it can so that most of the village sees it and cheers. That always runs long. Bringing extra oil is what anyone who had been to a wedding would do.

Bailey’s phrase for it is the long haul. There is no instant discipleship and no shortcut to maturity, and the parable is about the kind of readiness that has to be assembled in advance because it cannot be produced on demand.

How Do the Foolish React to Failure?

By shouting at people, and Bailey treats the pattern as part of the lesson.

When they run short they do not go and buy. They turn on their friends and demand: give us some of your oil.

When they arrive late and find the door shut they shout at the bridegroom: Lord, Lord, open to us.

Both responses are attempts to make someone else solve a problem created by their own lack of foresight, and neither works. Failure arriving late does not become somebody else’s obligation by being shouted about.

Bailey runs the same pattern into Luke 16, where the rich man in torment issues three orders in a row: send Lazarus with water, send him to my brothers. Barking instructions at other people is not, in these parables, a way out of a situation you made.

That Lord, Lord is not an accident either. The same doubled address appears at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, spoken by people who are told he never knew them.^[2]

Is the Parable Harsh?

The door closes, and the parable does not apologise for it.

What softens the reading slightly is what the parable is not saying. Nobody is condemned for being poor, or for being unimpressive, or for falling asleep. All ten sleep and five are received.

What it will not do is treat readiness as something that can be arranged at the last minute by appealing to other people. The closing instruction is to watch, because the day and hour are unknown, and the parable has just demonstrated what watching means in practice, which is preparing when nothing appears to be happening.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the two builders, which makes a related point about work done before the weather arrives.

Footnotes2

1. That all ten fall asleep removes the reading most people carry away, which is that the parable is about staying awake. It is not. Sleep is common ground, and the difference was settled before anyone got drowsy.
2. The doubled Lord, Lord connects this parable to the close of the Sermon on the Mount, where the same address is used by people who prophesied and cast out demons and are still told to depart. Matthew appears to be building a pattern with that phrase, and it is worth tracing across the Gospel.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 20. Supports the reading of the oil as non-transferable preparation, the clay lamps carried in front of the face, the wedding procession and why it runs long, the observations of Ibn al-Tayyib on the choice of ten women, the emphasis on the long haul, the analysis of how the foolish react to failure, and the link to the rich man of Luke 16. Supplied in full.

Ibn al-Tayyib, eleventh-century Baghdad physician, monk and biblical commentator, cited in Bailey. His Arabic commentary has never been translated into English, so Bailey is the only route to him.

ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), note on Matt 25:1. The alternative rendering of lampas as torch, against the clay lamp Bailey works from. In print, and in Logos.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 25:1-13, Matt 24:45-51, Matt 7:21-23, John 18:3, and Luke 16:19-31.

Where the sourcing stops: Ibn al-Tayyib's claim that ten males were required for a valid wedding is reported by Bailey and I have not independently verified the practice. The reading of the number as compensating for a gender gap is Bailey's interpretation of his commentary rather than a claim in the parable. The observation that a torch would need replenishing sooner than a lamp is mine, and it is an inference about the object rather than something either translation argues.