The Tenants in the Vineyard: Squatters Rights (14 of 26)

The plot only works if you know what the tenants were counting on.

They kill the owner’s son in order to take the vineyard, which reads as pure stupidity. Murder the heir and you invite the full weight of the law. Bailey’s reading explains why they thought otherwise, and it makes the parable considerably darker.

What Happens in the Parable of the Tenants?

A man plants a vineyard, equips it fully, leases it to tenants and goes away. At harvest he sends servants for his share. The tenants beat them, insult them, injure them, and in Mark’s version kill them.

Finally he sends his son, saying they will respect him. The tenants see him coming, say this is the heir and the inheritance will be ours, and kill him.

Jesus then asks what the owner will do, and quotes the psalm about the stone the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone.

What Were the Tenants Actually Thinking?

That possession was the whole game, and that nobody was going to come and take it back.

They were renters and they knew it. Bailey’s point is that they had begun operating on something like squatters’ rights: hold the land long enough, establish the facts on the ground, remove the only remaining claimant, and the vineyard becomes theirs by default. He grounds that on a ruling in the Mishnah, Baba Batra 3.1, which says that title to houses, cisterns, fields and the like is secured by three completed years of occupation.

I had that ruling standing behind this section in the first version, and I have to take it out. Snodgrass points out that the same tractate, Baba Batra 3.1-6, says in so many words that tenants may not acquire land this way. Three years of unprotested possession conveyed ownership to an occupier, and a tenant is named as the exception. So the one legal path the tenants might have imagined was closed to them, and the Mishnah passage that gets cited for their plan is the passage that forbids it.^[1]

That does not wreck the reading so much as sharpen it. Snodgrass’s line is that the tenants were never concerned with legal ownership; they were interested in possession and use, and the Greek word for inheritance, klēronomia, often means possession rather than a legal estate. The Septuagint uses that very verb for Ahab taking Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21:15-16. Jezebel tells him to get up and take possession of it, and the word is klēronomei, inherit. Ahab did not inherit anything. He had the owner killed and walked in. That is the model the tenants are working from: not a legal path to title, but a vineyard whose owner is out of reach and whose only claimant has just walked into the gate alone.

The arrival of the son alone would have suggested something specific to them. An heir travelling without an armed retinue looks like a man whose father has no force to send. They may well have concluded that the owner was dead or dying, and that the son was coming to claim an inheritance he had just received. The ESV Study Bible reaches the same inference on its own, and calls the plan bold but plausible.

Kill him and there is no claimant left.

That is not stupidity. It is a calculation, and it is wrong.

Why Does the Owner Send His Son Alone?

Because he has run out of everything except vulnerability, and Bailey reads that as the theological centre.

The owner has options. He has already been given every reason to send force, and any landowner in that world had the means. Beaten servants, injured servants, in Mark’s telling dead servants.

He does not send soldiers. He sends his son, unarmed and unaccompanied, on the assumption that they will respect him.

Snodgrass adds a legal layer under that. A servant or an agent could not lodge a formal protest on the owner’s behalf; sending the son is what it looked like when a dispute moved from collection to something closer to court. So the son’s arrival was a signal as well as a risk. The tenants read the signal and answered it.

Bailey describes this as anger reprocessed into grace, the same movement he identifies in the great banquet. Real anger, absorbed rather than discharged, and converted into a further approach. The short-term result of that decision is that the son dies.

Is the Son in the Parable of the Tenants Jesus?

Here, unusually, yes without much argument.

The vineyard image was not ambiguous. Isa 5 makes Israel God’s vineyard, and everyone in the audience knew it. The servants sent and abused are the prophets. And the parable ends with Jesus quoting a psalm about a rejected stone and applying it, days before his arrest, in front of the leadership he is describing.

The psalm is doing more work than an English reader can see. In Hebrew the word for stone is eben and the word for son is ben, and the pun was live in the first century. Josephus records that during the siege of Jerusalem the watchmen on the walls, seeing a Roman catapult stone in the air, shouted in their own language that the son is coming, and everyone in range dropped flat.^[2] So when Jesus follows a story about a murdered son with a verse about a rejected stone, the two are the same figure, and the builders who rejected it are a stock phrase for the religious leaders. Snodgrass argues that this is the moment the parable lands on its hearers: nobody listening would have cast himself as the tenants until the stone verse told him who the builders were.

Luke reports that they understood he had spoken the parable against them and wanted to seize him that hour.

So this is one of the places where the interpretation is not something readers supply afterward. The original audience got it immediately and reacted.

Who Is Actually Judged?

The leadership, and Bailey notes the judgment is narrower than people assume.

In Isaiah’s song the vineyard itself is destroyed. Here it is not. The owner takes it from these tenants and gives it to others, which is a change of management rather than a demolition.^[3]

The crowd is not condemned in the parable and does not turn on Jesus in the narrative. They keep protecting him, which is exactly why the leadership has to move at night.^[4]

That distinction matters for how the parable gets used. It is aimed at people entrusted with something who began treating it as theirs, and the correction is that stewardship was never ownership.

What Are the Fruits That Were Owed?

Isaiah names them and the parable leaves it implied.

Isa 5:7 says God looked for justice and found bloodshed, looked for righteousness and heard a cry. That is what the vineyard was planted to produce.

Jesus does not restate the list. He assumes his hearers know the source and lets the omission do the work, which is a pattern across the parables and one reason they reward knowing the Old Testament well.

The tenants’ failure is not that the harvest was poor. It is that they kept it.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the wedding feast, which Matthew places immediately after this one.

Footnotes4

1. Bailey quotes the ruling from Danby's Mishnah: title by usucaption to houses, cisterns, trenches, vaults, dovecots, bath-houses, olive-presses, irrigated fields, slaves, and anything that brings constant gain, is secured by occupation during three completed years. He reads it as the mentality the tenants were working from. Snodgrass, who wrote a whole earlier book on this one parable, notes that Baba Batra 3.1-6 explicitly states that tenants may not acquire land by this means, and concludes that the tenants were never after legal ownership at all. I have gone with Snodgrass on the law and kept Bailey on the mentality, since the two are not in conflict once you drop the idea that the plan could have worked in court.
2. Josephus, Jewish War 5.272. The Loeb translation softens the cry to "Sonny's coming"; Snodgrass restores "the son is coming" and argues that since the War was first written in Aramaic and the pun still survives in Greek, the objection that it only works in Hebrew does not hold. Even a listener who spoke only Aramaic would have known the Hebrew word for son.
3. The vineyard surviving is the detail that separates this parable from Isaiah's song, which it otherwise closely tracks. Isaiah's vineyard is torn down. This one changes hands. Whatever else the parable is doing, it is not announcing the end of the project.
4. That the crowd is not the target of the judgment is worth stating clearly, because this parable has a long history of being read as a verdict on a people rather than on a leadership. The text has the multitude siding with Jesus, and the danger to him comes from the men who understood the parable was about them.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 32. Supports the reading of the tenants as acting on assumed squatters' rights, which he grounds on Mishnah Baba Batra 3.1 (Danby's translation); the post now qualifies that citation, see Snodgrass below. Also supports the owner's choice of vulnerability over force, the reprocessing of anger into grace, the identification of the fruits with justice and righteousness from Isa 5:7, and the observation that judgment falls on the leadership rather than on the vineyard or the people. Supplied in full.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), "The Wicked Tenants". Supports the correction that Mishnah Baba Batra 3.1-6 explicitly excludes tenants from acquiring land by three years' possession; the reading of klēronomia as possession rather than legal inheritance, with the Septuagint of 1 Kings 21:15-16 (3 Kingdoms 20 in the LXX numbering) using klēronomei for Ahab taking Naboth's vineyard; the point that a servant or agent could not lodge a formal protest and that sending the son marked a change in the dispute; the eben/ben wordplay, with Josephus, Jewish War 5.272, as evidence that it worked in Greek and Aramaic; "builders" as a stock term for the religious leaders; and the argument that the hearers would not have identified with the tenants until the stone quotation. In print, and in Logos.

Josephus, The Jewish War 5.272, on the watchmen's cry "the son is coming" during the Roman bombardment of Jerusalem. Quoted from Snodgrass, who adapts the Loeb translation.

Mishnah, Baba Batra 3.1-6, on title by three years' occupation and its exclusion of tenants. Compiled c. AD 200. Cited here through Bailey (Danby) and Snodgrass; I have not gone to Danby directly for this post.

ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), notes on Mark 12:1-12 and Mark 12:7. Independently reaches the inference that the tenants may have assumed the heir's arrival meant the landlord had died, and calls the plan bold but plausible. In print, and in Logos.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 21:33-46, Mark 12:1-12, Luke 20:9-19, Isa 5:1-7, Isa 8:14-15, Ps 118:22, and 1 Kings 21:15-16.

Where the sourcing stops: the specific inference that the tenants concluded the owner was dead is a reconstruction of their reasoning rather than something the text states, and it is offered as the most coherent account of an otherwise irrational plan; the ESV note reaches it independently, which is a second witness to the inference and not to the fact. The first version of this post rested the tenants' plan on Baba Batra 3.1 as a squatters' rights rule. Snodgrass shows the same passage excludes tenants, so that support has been withdrawn and the Naboth parallel put in its place; the Naboth reading is Snodgrass's, and it describes what the tenants wanted, not a legal mechanism by which they could have got it. I have relied on Snodgrass for the Josephus quotation and for the Mishnah wording rather than checking either against a full edition.