The Unforgiving Servant and the Impossible Debt (21 of 26)

The parable is built on two numbers and most readers never convert them.

Once you do, the story stops being about a man who was ungrateful and becomes about a man who did not understand what had happened to him.

How Big Was the First Debt?

Unpayable, and deliberately absurd.

Ten thousand talents. A talent was six thousand denarii and a denarius was a day’s pay, so the debt is sixty million days of labour. How many years that comes to depends on how many days a year you think a labourer worked. Divide by the full calendar and a talent is about sixteen years’ wages and the whole debt a little over a hundred and sixty thousand years, which is Snodgrass’s figure. Take out sabbaths and festivals and divide by working days, as the ESV does, and a talent is about twenty years and the debt roughly two hundred thousand. Either way it is thousands of working lifetimes, and the exact number is not the point.^[1]

That is not a large debt. It is a number chosen to be impossible, larger than the annual tax revenue of whole provinces. Snodgrass supplies the comparison that makes that concrete. Josephus puts Herod the Great’s entire annual revenue at about nine hundred talents: two hundred from Galilee and Perea, a hundred from the territories that went to Philip, six hundred from the regions Archelaus ruled. The servant owes eleven years of the whole kingdom’s income. No servant could accumulate it and no servant could repay it.

Which makes his offer to the king faintly ridiculous. Have patience with me and I will pay you everything. He cannot, and everyone hearing the story knows he cannot, and the king cancels it anyway.

Bailey adds something about the plea that I had missed. The verb the servant uses, makrothumeō, is one of the New Testament’s great words for patience, and it does not mean delay. Literally it belongs to the one who can and does put his anger far away, the patience of a victor who refuses to take vengeance; Bailey’s example is David standing over the sleeping Saul with the spear in his hand. So the first thing the servant asks is that the king sheathe his wrath. The promise to pay is the rider, and it is the rider that is ridiculous. The request itself is answered, and answered far beyond what was asked.

How Big Was the Second Debt?

Real, and recoverable, and that is the point.

A hundred denarii. A denarius was a day’s pay, so a hundred days of work, somewhere in the region of twenty weeks’ wages, or a little over three months if you count every day.

It is a serious sum for a working man. It is also entirely payable, which is why the second servant’s plea is not ridiculous at all. He asks for patience and he could actually deliver.

The parable puts a genuine debt next to an impossible one. Sixty million against a hundred is a ratio of six hundred thousand to one, and the man who was released from the larger figure refuses to wait out a hundred days for the smaller.

What Was the Servant Facing?

Sale, and not only his own.

The king orders him sold along with his wife and children and everything he had. That was a real legal remedy for debt in that world, and the parable does not soften it. It is sometimes said that Jewish law allowed none of this, no sale of a wife, no slavery for debt, no torture. Snodgrass thinks the evidence is not so clear, and points to the Old Testament’s own record of people sold for what they owed, the widow’s sons in 2 Kings 4:1 and the families in Neh 5:5, with the dry observation that laws get written down because they are being broken.

So the cancellation is not a gesture. It is the man’s household handed back to him, whole, on the strength of a request he had no standing to make.

What Does He Do Immediately After?

Goes out and finds the man who owes him a hundred days’ wages, seizes him by the throat, and demands payment.

The physical detail is in the text and it is not incidental. He has just been released from something that would have destroyed his family, and his first recorded act is violence over a manageable sum.

The other servants see it and are greatly distressed, which is Matthew’s way of telling the reader how it looked from outside. Somebody watched this happen and reported it.^[2]

Why Is the King So Severe at the End?

Because the parable is answering a question about limits.

Peter has just asked how many times he must forgive a brother, and proposed seven, which was generous by the standards being discussed. The rabbinic baseline was three. The ESV note traces it to Amos 1:3 and Job 33:29-30, and Snodgrass quotes the Tosefta’s version: if a man sins two or three times they forgive him, but on the fourth they do not. Peter has more than doubled that and expects credit. Jesus answers with seventy-seven, or seventy times seven depending on the rendering, which is a way of saying stop counting.

The number is not random. Tertullian, in his treatise on prayer, noticed that it is Lamech’s number. In Gen 4:24 Lamech boasts that if Cain is avenged seven times, Lamech will be avenged seventy-seven times, and Tertullian reads Jesus as taking that boast of unlimited vengeance and remoulding it into unlimited forgiveness. The ESV note makes the same connection. Seventy-seven is the old arithmetic of revenge run backwards.

Snodgrass would put the relationship between the question and the story a little differently, and he is worth hearing. The parable, he says, is not and was not intended to be an illustration of the seventy-seven; it teaches the necessity of forgiving rather than its limitlessness, and Matthew has set the two side by side because both concern forgiveness, not because they say the same thing. I still think the placement is doing what it looks like it is doing, but the distinction is fair: the story does not say forgive without limit, it says a man who has been forgiven and will not forgive has not understood his position.

The parable then explains why counting is the wrong activity. A man who has been handed back thousands of working lifetimes cannot sensibly keep a ledger of hundred-day debts, and the fact that he does means he never grasped the first transaction.

The severity at the end is not the king changing his mind about mercy. It is the withdrawal of a mercy that had visibly failed to take.

Is Forgiveness Therefore Conditional?

That is the hard edge of the parable and it should not be filed down.

The closing line has the Father dealing the same way with anyone who does not forgive a brother from the heart. The same sentence appears in the Lord’s Prayer, where forgiveness received is tied to forgiveness extended.

Jesus was not the first to say it. The nearest thing to the closing line in Jewish literature is Sirach 28:2-4, and Snodgrass puts it at the head of his parallels: forgive your neighbour the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray; if one has no mercy toward another like himself, can he then seek pardon for his own sins? What the parable adds to Sirach is the order, and the numbers.

What the parable does not say is that forgiveness is earned by forgiving. The order in the story runs the other way. The cancellation comes first, unprompted and unearned, and everything after it is a response that either happens or does not.

The servant’s failure is not that he priced his forgiveness too low. It is that he took an unpayable release and went straight back to accounting.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the parable of the talents, which uses the same currency to different effect.

Footnotes2

1. Doing the arithmetic is the single most useful thing a reader can do with this parable, and almost nobody does it. Ten thousand talents against a hundred denarii is a ratio in the region of six hundred thousand to one, and the parable is engineered around that gap. Note that estimates of what a talent was worth vary from fifteen to twenty years of a labourer's wages, and the spread comes from whether you divide six thousand denarii by calendar days or by the days a man could actually work. Either way the ratio between the two debts is unaffected, because both are counted in the same denarii.
2. That the fellow servants report what they saw is a small realistic detail with a function. The parable does not have the king discover the offence supernaturally. Someone watched, was distressed, and told him, which is how these things usually come to light.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 16-28 (London: SPCK, 2002), on Matt 18:21-35. Supports the reading of the two debts and the scale of the disparity between them. Wright gives a talent as roughly fifteen years of a labourer's wages. Supplied in full.

ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), notes on Matt 18:21-22, Matt 18:24 and Matt 18:28. Gives a talent as about twenty years of a labourer's wages and a hundred denarii as about twenty weeks, both reached by counting working days rather than calendar days, which is the source of the difference between the figures here and Wright's. Also supports the rabbinic three-times baseline behind Peter's seven, traced to Job 33:29-30 and Amos 1:3, and the suggestion that seventy-seven echoes and reverses Lamech's boast in Gen 4:24. In print, and in Logos.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), "The Unforgiving Servant". Supports the calendar-day arithmetic (sixty million denarii, a day labourer over 164,000 years to repay); Herod the Great's annual revenue of about nine hundred talents, from Josephus, Antiquities 17.318-20; the caution that claims about Jewish law forbidding sale of a wife, debt-slavery and torture are often repeated but the evidence is not so clear, with 2 Kings 4:1 and Neh 5:5; the Tosefta text on forgiving three times but not a fourth (t. Yoma 4.13); Sirach 28:2-4 as the leading Jewish parallel to the closing verse; and the judgment that the parable is not, and was not intended to be, an illustration of Matt 18:21-22, but was placed beside it by Matthew because both concern forgiveness. In print, and in Logos.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke, combined ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), Through Peasant Eyes, chapter on the Judge and the Widow. Supports the reading of makrothumeō in the servant's plea as putting one's anger far away, the patience of the victor who refuses vengeance, with David and the sleeping Saul as the example, and Bailey's application of it to Matt 18:26. In print, and in Logos.

Tertullian, On Prayer, chapter 7, in ANF vol. 3 (1885). Supports the observation that seventy-seven is Lamech's number from Gen 4:24, remoulded from vengeance into forgiveness. Free in full at ccel.org.

Josephus, Antiquities 17.318-20, on the tax revenue of Herod's territories after his death. Cited through Snodgrass; I have not gone to Josephus directly for this post.

Sirach 28:2-4 and Tosefta Yoma 4.13, both quoted from Snodgrass's collection of primary parallels.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 18:21-35, Matt 6:12-15, Gen 4:24, Amos 1:3, Job 33:29-30, 2 Kings 4:1 and Neh 5:5.

Where the sourcing stops: the conversion of talents and denarii into years and working lifetimes is arithmetic rather than citation, and it depends on how many days a year a labourer worked and how long a working life was, neither of which any ancient source supplies. That is why the post now gives a range (a talent as sixteen to twenty years) rather than one figure; an earlier version of this post gave fifteen years and three months, and the body now carries the range and says where each figure comes from. The ratio between the two debts, six hundred thousand to one, does not depend on any of that and is the number to trust. The Herod revenue figure and the Tosefta and Sirach texts come through Snodgrass and I have not checked them against Josephus or the Tosefta directly. The relationship between forgiving and being forgiven is a genuine theological difficulty and this post describes the order the parable presents rather than resolving the question.