I finished Brad Young's Jesus and His Jewish Parables: Rediscovering the Roots of Jesus' Teaching. In this post, I'll talk about Young's comments on the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37).
Young
states that his mentor, David Flusser, believed that the Parable of the
Good Samaritan adapted an incident that is discussed in rabbinic
literature, in Tosefta Yoma 1:12 and Babylonian Talmud Yoma 23a. In
this story, two priests are running in the Temple, and one stabs the
other. Rabbi Tzadok was then curious about how to apply a law in Deuteronomy 21
about what to do when one finds a corpse. The victim's father notices
that his son is in convulsions, however, which means that the son is not
dead, and so the knife within the son is not yet unclean. The narrator
then says that the Israelites were more concerned about the purity of a
knife than murder (presumably because they sought to protect the Temple
from defilement), and it cites II Kings 21:16, which states that
Manasseh (a wicked king) shed a lot of innocent blood. In the Tosefta,
we read that the sanctuary was made unclean on account of murder. The
narrator appears to disapprove of preoccupation with ritual at the
expense of human life.
Similarly, in the Parable of the Good
Samaritan, the priest and the Levite do not help the half-dead man, and
that could be because they feared being ritually defiled were the man to
die, since touching a corpse caused ritual impurity. But the
Samaritan, whose culture also had purity regulations, chose to place
love for another human being above ritual purity regulations and helped
the man. Young refers to a scholar who held that the Samaritan was
placing himself in danger for so doing, for, if the Samaritan were
carrying a half-dead Jew, couldn't observers wrongfully conclude that
the Samaritan attempted to kill the Jew, especially with the hostility
against Samaritans that existed in those days? And wouldn't the
victim's family then seek retaliation against the Samaritan?
Young states that, according to Semachot 1:1 (see here
for information on Semachot, which appears to be part of editions of
the Babylonian Talmud), Jews were required to help a man even if his
imminent death was certain. Semachot is a much later source, but Young
does well to highlight that, within Judaism, there was a concern for
human life and criticism of elevating the ritual above the moral. That
should counterbalance the blanket notion that Christianity is good while
Judaism is bad. At the same time, perhaps the Parable of the Good
Samaritan is revolutionary in that a member of a despised, non-Jewish
group, a Samaritan, is the hero of the story. This is not to suggest
that Gentiles were portrayed as evil throughout rabbinic literature,
though.