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Unlike the other evangelists Matthew introduces his gospel with a table of ancestry.(1) Certain features distinguish it as a novel presentation of a family tree.  In contrast to Luke 3:23-38, the only other genealogy of Jesus in the New Testament, it begins with Abraham, the grand patriarch of Israel, and moves forward through the individual generations to its culmination in "Jesus who is called Messiah."  Forty names succeed each other in unbroken father-son relationships; the forty-first is Jesus, but his link to this chain of successive generations is ambiguous.  The verb egennesen ("he generated") is used 39 times to connect these father and son pairs, but at the crucial point in verse 16 it does not relate Jesus to Joseph.  Instead Joseph is identified as "the husband of Mary," and Mary is designated as the one "from whom Jesus who is called Messiah was born."  Four other women of different reputations have been included previously among the male descendants through whom the family line moves, even though they are not to be counted separately as individual generations.  Finally, in contrast to Luke's register of names - and most others - Matthew's genealogy is numerically structured according to a pattern, which seems to demarcate three divisions each consisting of fourteen names (1:17). 

All of these distinctive features have something to do with the origin of Jesus.  He is the climactic goal and termination of Israel's history, and yet he does not appear to be directly or immediately linked to it.  The ambiguity of verse 16, which in spite of the textual variants in the manuscript tradition that seek to resolve it, raises the question of Jesus' relationship to Joseph.(2) Is he his son or not? If he is, what is the purpose of 1:18-25?  If he is not, how can he belong to the genealogy and be regarded as its culmination? 

To comprehend this unusual table of ancestry it is necessary to recognize its arbitrary character.  This becomes more apparent through a comparison of its content with its Old Testament sources.  The first fourteen generations from Abraham to David correspond to those named in various lists recorded in the Old Testament, especially 1 Chron. 1:28-2:15.(3) There are, however, gaps in the second division of fourteen.  Three successive kings of Judah:  Ahaziah, Joash and Amaziah, listed in 1 Chron. 3:11-2, have been excluded.  Jehoiachim who succeeded Josiah and who was the father of Jehoiachin or Jechoniah, is also missing.  Various reasons for their omission have been offered, but none has been especially convincing.(4) Why certain ones and not others may no longer be ascertainable.  What matters is that verse 17 indicates an imposed limit of fourteen generations to each division, and that requires the exclusion of some names. 

This arbitrary employment of the number fourteen, however, is called into question by an apparent deficiency in the third and final section of the genealogy, which lists only thirteen generations.  That might be accounted for by the inadequacy of the extra-biblical source from which most of these names have been derived, for only two of them, Salathiel and Zerubbabel, appear in the ancestry tables of 1 Chron. 3:17-24.  But such reasoning from silence is groundless.  On the other hand, at this point it might seem more cogent to dismiss the entire genealogy with all of its idiosyncrasies as the work of earlier tradition.  Matthew simply adopted it and without critical revision placed it at the head of his gospel.(5)

Nevertheless, in spite of these difficulties verse 17 must not be set aside too quickly; it provides the key to the genealogy.  A correct counting of its individual generations is crucial to an under-standing of its numerical schemes and their theological purpose.  According to verse 17, "… all the generations from Abraham to David (are) fourteen generations and from David to the Babylonian deportation fourteen generations and from the Babylonian deportation to the Messiah fourteen generations."  David is mentioned twice; he ends the first division of names and begins the second.  An enumeration indicates that he is the fourteenth generation and so the end of the first section of the genealogy.  If he is counted a second time, the number of names in the second group totals fifteen.  Obviously, if verse 17 is to be observed, this cannot be correct, unless Jechoniah were omitted at the end of the second division and counted at the beginning of the third.  That would furnish an additional name for the final section and happily bring the total to fourteen.  But at the same time it would distort the reckoning for David would be counted twice, but Jechoniah, representing the transition of the Babylonian exile, only once.(6) If, however, each name represents one generation and is reckoned accordingly, the correspondence with the numerical scheme of verse 17 is almost perfect.  David and Jechoniah stand at the end of the first and second sections of the genealogy respectively.  Although they are named twice, they are only to be counted once.  As a matter of fact, since verse 17 substitutes an historical event, the Babylonian deportation, in place of Jechoniah as the conclusion of the second division of generations and the beginning of the third, it is evident that Matthew's genealogy is more than a table of ancestry.  Its structure, as indicated by verse 17, presents an historical outline. 

Both David and the Babylonian deportation mark an end as well as a beginning in this procession of people and events.  David closes that era of history which had been opened by Abraham, a time of "beginnings." But he also inaugurates a new epoch, "an age of kings," as the second division of the genealogy might aptly be called.  He is referred to in 1:6 as "the king," and as such he is the founder of the dynasty that follows.  The Babylonian deportation serves the same purpose in this historical scheme: it is an event of transition that terminates the age of kings and ushers in a new period of Israel's history as Jechoniah is carried into captivity with the Jewish people.  This third epoch, which is closed by Jesus the Messiah, might appropriately be designated "a time of exile." 

However, as already noted, this third division of the genealogy appears to be incomplete: only thirteen names are listed.  This deficiency may be attributed to the carelessness of Matthew's redaction(7) or the inaccuracy of his sources.(8) It may also be resolved by counting Jesus as the thirteenth generation and the risen Christ as the fourteenth.(9) But neither explanation corresponds to the character and purpose of the evangelist's work.  On the one hand, as will become evident, Matthew is a masterful literary artist and is in control of his writing as well as his use of the materials of tradition that are available to him.  On the other hand, he presents Jesus as the Christ already from the time of his birth. 

The incomplete number of generations in the third section of the genealogy is deliberate and is clarified by the origin and significance of the number fourteen which, according to verse 17, is the basis of the author's schematization of Israel's history.  The best clues are provided by the Messiah Apocalypse of 2 Baruch 53-74.  Matthew could not have utilized this millennial writing, for it was composed after his Gospel. But he appears to have been familiar with its pattern of fourteen or twelve plus two.  His scheme matches the apolocalyptist's organization and interpretation of Israel's history. 

The pattern which this visionary sees in the history of Israel is analogous to an enormous cloud that has emerged from "a very great sea . . . full of waters white and black" (53:1).  "Now this was done twelve times, but the black were always more numerous than the white" (53:6).  The first waters that fall upon the earth are dark because they symbolize the sin of Adam, and they become darker because of the sin that results in the waters of the flood (56:5-16).  The bright waters that follow are "the fount of Abraham" and the births of his son and grandson (57:1).  They are succeeded by the dark waters of slavery in Egypt (58:1).  Bright waters usher in the fourth period, the time of Moses and the Exodus (59:1-12).  But the fifth waters soon fall to make an end of this through the evil works of the Amorites (60:1).  The sixth waters are interpreted to be the illustrious reigns of David and Solomon (61:1-8).  Jeroboam's sin of the two golden calves, however, brings back the dark rains (62:1-8).  The eighth waters are bright again because righteousness flourishes in the time of Hezekiah's rule (63:1-11).  Manasseh's wickedness represents the murky ninth waters (64:1-10).  The bright tenth waters signify the restoration that takes place under Josiah (66:1-8).  "And the eleventh black waters which thou hast seen: this is the calamity now befalling Zion," namely Jerusalem laid waste by the king of Babylon (67:1-6).  The bright twelfth waters are interpreted as a time of restoration when Zion will be rebuilt, the Temple offerings reinstituted and the priests reinstated (68:4-8). 

Twelve episodes of epochs have occurred, but the goal of history has not yet been reached.  "For the last waters which thou hast seen which were darker than all that were before them, those which were after the twelfth number which were collected together belong to the whole world" (69:1).  Although this final rainfall is not numbered, it is to all intents and purposes the thirteenth.  As such it is the unluckiest, the most tragic period in history: "And it shall come to pass that whoever gets safe out of the fire shall be destroyed by famine . . . for all the earth shall devour its inhabitants." 

At the consummation of this darkest rainfall a lightning bolt flashes across the sky which is identified as the messiah: "… he shall summon all nations, and some he shall spare and some of them he shall slay" (72:2).  After he has carried out the great judgment, the fourteenth and final age is inaugurated, "the beginning of that which is not corruptible" (74:2).  "Then healing shall descend in dew, and disease shall withdraw, and anxiety and anguish and lamentation pass away and gladness proceed through the whole earth" (73:2). 

Matthew's numerically structured genealogy parallels this arbitrary schematization of Israel's history.  Moreover, the supposed discrepancy between the statement of verse 17 that there are fourteen generations from the Babylonian deportation to the Messiah and the actual number thirteen names listed in the table is resolved by it.  Indeed, it is in the third division of the genealogy that the scheme of twelve plus two or fourteen has its real application.  That is, there are twelve ancestors and Jesus the Messiah who, in contrast to all the other individuals in the family tree is to be counted twice.  He represents two generations, not consecutively, but simultaneously from the beginning of his life. 

His birth marks the end of the age of exile.  He is "the king of the Jews" who draws the Magi from the east, and "they rejoice with exceeding great joy" when they arrive at his home in Bethlehem in order to pay him homage.  But his birth also elicits the dreadful response of Herod the Great who dispatches his soldiers to slaughter all the infant boys in Bethlehem and the surrounding regions.  Jesus as the sole survivor of this massacre becomes the bearer of this holocaust character and will embody its judgment at the end of his life when this sequence of the new age and death will be reversed.  His abandonment by God at death will constitute the darkest moment in history for it will be accompanied by the return of the creation to its primeval chaos: "…and the earth was shaken and the rocks were torn apart" (27:51).  The awakening of the saints which immediately follows signals the beginning of this new creation: "And the tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints having been asleep were raised; and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered the holy city and were manifested to many" (27:53-3).  Because Jesus' life is the ground on which the consummating events of history occur, he is the bearer of two generations.  His death not only relates him to the thirteenth episode in the scheme of the Messiah Apocalypse; the resurrection of the saints effected by the emission of his final divine breath of life (27:50), links him to the fourteenth, the beginning of a new time. But an ambiguity arises at this point.  If Jesus represents two generations, in as far as he is the fourteenth (as well as the thirteenth) he is also a figure of transition like David the king.  He ends the third period, the age of exile, and inaugurates a new era.  That implies that the genealogy is not terminated by Jesus.  Jesus is not the end of history and the beginning of a new creation.  He upholds the continuity of history which, according to Jesus' discourse on eschatology is consummated by the Parousia of the Human Being and the ingathering of his community (24:29-31). 

But numerical patterns govern the construction of Matthew's genealogy.  Both appear to have been derived from apocalyptic millennialism.  Twelve plus two or fourteen, as it is specified in verse 17, parallels the schematization of history in the Messiah Apocalypse of 2 Baruch.  The four ages implied in the division of the generations correspond to the plan of history conveyed by Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a giant image composed of four precious metal (Dan. 2) and Daniel's vision of four chaos monsters emerging from the sea (Dan. 7). 

But these numerical arrangements, which the evangelist combines in 1:17, are eschatological interpretations of history, which cannot be reconciled with each other.  According to the number fourteen or twelve plus two, Jesus is the end of history and the agent of a new creation.  According to the number four, he belongs to the history of salvation.  He is an arching figure who bridges two epochs, the one he has terminated with the one he inaugurates.  In contrast to Daniel's millennial vision, Jesus is "the one like a human being" who brings the kingdom of God in history, not at the end of it.  Matthew makes no effort to resolve this discrepancy.  The numerical schemes and their incipient eschatologies are united with two different christologies and held in tension throughout the gospel. 

In this light the meaning of the gospel's opening Words: "Book of the origin of Jesus Christ" can more adequately be understood.  It is not immediately apparent whether they are intended as a superscription of the whole composition or only the introduction to the genealogical table, which follows. The latter seems more logical since the genealogy presents the origin of Jesus as the culmination of the historical process of Israel's begetting.  Although such a continuity is implied, verse 18, which clarifies the ambiguity of verse 16, discloses that there is no immediate link between Joseph and Jesus.  The progression of father begetting son moves forward uninterrupted for forty generations.  At the forty-first the continuity is broken.  Jesus who was generated by the holy Spirit introduces a disjunction.  In this respect he is like Abraham who stands at the beginning of the genealogy as the grand patriarch of Israel, the originator of a new people and their unique history.  As a result, the superscription: "Book of the origin of Jesus Christ" cannot apply only to the genealogical table.  It reaches beyond it to 1:18-25 which explains the origin of Jesus and his relationship to the preceding generations.  Yet as soon as these closing verses of the prologue are connected to the opening words of the evangelist, the body of the gospel that follows must necessarily be included because the subsequent content of Jesus' life elucidates the disclosure of 1:18b as well as the discrepant eschatologies that are conveyed by the two numerical schemes of verse 17. 

While the origin of Jesus was linked initially to the progression of father and son generations in the genealogy, it is subsequently connected to Mary in verses 16 and 18.  Like the four women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and "the wife of Uriah" who precede her, she is another irregularity in the history of Israel.  The differences in the evangelist's syntactical constructions, however, hint that her pregnancy is the greatest anomaly of the entire genealogy.  The four who serve as her forerunners were presented as the objects of the preposition ek ("from"): " . . . Solomon generated Boaz from Rahab;" "Boaz generated Obed from Ruth;" "David generated Solomon from the wife of Uriah."(10) In contrast Joseph did not generate Jesus from Mary, although she is identified as his wife and Jesus' mother. 

The ambiguity of 1:16 demands clarification, and scribal revision has attempted to furnish it by unequivocally specifying Mary in advance as "a virgin" and thereby removing the vagueness of Jesus' relation to Joseph. But the clarification is provided by the evangelist himself in verse 18, "But the genesis of Jesus Christ was thus." "Genesis" or origin is a repetition of the word that appears in he superscription of 1:1.  Some ancient scribes substituted gennesis, a word that is similar in sound but is spelled differently and means "birth."  Although "genesis" is the textual reading preferred by most authorities, the word "birth" is nevertheless used in many English translations of 1:18.  But Matthew is interested in Jesus' origin, not his birth; and the immediate purpose is the clarification of the important ambiguity of verse 16.  The adverb "thus" indicates that this will now be done. 

Without reluctance or uncertainty Matthew ascribes Jesus' origin to the generating activity of the holy Spirit: "While his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph before they had sexual intercourse she was found pregnant from the holy Spirit."  By its position at the end of the sentence the phrase "from the holy Spirit" receives special emphasis; it is curiously similar to several previous prepositional phrases in the genealogy which call attention to various irregularities in the history of Israel: "from Tamar," "from Rahab," "from Ruth," "from the wife of Uriah." 

The conceptualization of the relationship between Mary and the holy Spirit which Matthew intends to convey is crucial to a proper understanding of Jesus' origin: "Mary was found pregnant from the holy Spirit;" "for that which has been generated in her is from holy Spirit" (1:20).  The verb gennan ("to generate") which was used 39 times to link father and son pairs and which therefore carries the meaning of "fathering by an act of sexual intercourse" is also used of Jesus' origin.  This and the phraseology of procreation which the evangelist employs, "before they had sexual intercourse" (1:18b), "… he did not know her … " (1:25a), might suggest that the holy Spirit is the male partner of Mary and that Jesus' generation is to be conceived as the result of their sexual union.  Such an understanding of Jesus' origin is often attached to a certain uniqueness that is ascribed to Mary.  In contrast to the four women who precede her in the genealogy she is construed to be a virgin.  The tradition of 1:18-25 often serves as a proof text of the so-called virgin birth of Jesus.  But there is no such identification of Mary by the evangelist except in the fulfillment quotation of 1:23 which interrupts the narrative; and then it is the designation "the virgin."  In spite of its absence in many English translations the definite article is purposeful and should not be overlooked.  Mary is "the virgin," and as such she plays a distinguished role in the origin of Jesus. 

Moreover, the generation of Jesus is not to be interpreted as the result of a sexual union.  The preposition ek ("from"), as in "from the holy Spirit" may simply denote origin without the accompanying connotation of male impregnator.  Mathew's use of the clause en gastri echousa in verses 18b and 23 seems to be chosen carefully and, as in the Septuagint text of Gen. 38:18, 24, 25 and 2Sam. 11:3 simply expresses the condition of being pregnant.  It has been substituted by the evangelist in his fulfillment quotation (1:23) in place of the clause en gastri lempsetai ("she will conceive") that appears in the Septuagint version of Is. 7:14 and implies a conception originated by the agency of the male principle when it is followed by the preposition "from." (11)

In the New Testament the combination of the verb "to generate" (gennan) and the accompanying prepositional phrase, "from the (holy) Spirit" is limited to the Johannine tradition where it seems to have the character of a formula.  In John 3:5 John tells Nicodemus that one must be "generated from water and Spirit."  The Spirit is an inexplicable reality which "blows where it wills and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes to. So is everyone who has been generated from the Spirit."(12)

Such a divine origin by the creative activity of the Spirit is attributed to Jesus by the evangelist Matthew.  Mary has no husband.  She is only "betrothed to Joseph" who "did not know her until she bore a son."  There is no possibility of her conceiving and bearing a child.  It is entirely the work of the Spirit who generates Jesus by a direct act of creation. 

By reason of this unusual genesis Jesus is a second Adam who like his prototype is thoroughly human but who, in view of his divine generation, may also be called "the Son of God."  That in fact is one of the christological titles conferred on Jesus in the course of the gospel: by Simon Peter in 16:16 and by the centurion of the crucifixion in 27:54; and it is implied in the identification of the virgin's son as Emmanuel in 1:23.(13)  But the epithet that conveys the identity of Jesus in terms of his "having been generated in her (Mary) from the holy Spirit" as a new human being is the one that appears consistently on his lips as a self-designation: "the Son of Man". 

Although the maternity of Mary is accentuated in the ambiguity of verse 16 and its elucidation in verse 18b, the narrative of 1:18-25 is told from the point of view of Joseph.  This has often been noted but unfortunately interpreted as an apologetic motive.  The shift back to Joseph in Matthew's explanation of Jesus' origin is based on his decisive position in the genealogy.  For if Jesus is the climax of the history of Israel, at least in terms of his identity as the Son of David, he is that by reason of his relationship to Joseph and not to Mary.(14) Although Joseph is not physically involved in the generation of Jesus, he is betrothed to Mary, and the irregularity of her pregnancy must be explained to him.  For as a "righteous" Jew, as he is characterized in verse 19, and therefore as one who is obedient to the law, he is obligated to dissolve this betrothal in view of Mary's apparent unfaithfulness.  While contemplating a quiet divorce he is approached by the angel of the Lord, addressed as "Son of David" and commanded to make Mary's child his own by adoption.  Only as a result of this obedience is Jesus linked to the history of Israel. 

Joseph belongs to the substance of tradition available to the evangelist.  Although not mentioned in Mark or Q and appearing only in the first two chapters of Matthew's gospel, he can hardly be the invention of the evangelist.  In Luke he is named both as the man to whom Mary was engaged (1:27) and as the father - "as was supposed" - of Jesus (3:23, 4:22).  The fourth gospel refers to him twice as the father of Jesus (1:45, 6:42).  Matthew's Joseph is unique in gospel literature.  Nowhere is he sketched more concretely, nowhere does he play a more active role in relation to the birth of Jesus.  Only the first evangelist characterizes him as "righteous" and then proceeds to show how this basic trait is manifested in his conduct both toward Mary and Jesus.  While he wants no part in Mary's seeming unchastity, he has no desire to shame her publicly.  Moreover, making Mary his wife also involves adopting her child and relating to it as a father.  Joseph not only acknowledges his fatherhood by naming the boy; he assumes the responsibility of his safety by taking mother and infant to Egypt in order to escape from the murderous designs of Herod the Great and subsequently by moving his family to Nazareth in order to avoid the jeopardy of living under the rule of Archelaus. 

This representation of Joseph seems to be invested with certain Old Testament features and allusions, which contribute to the evangelist's theological interpretation of Jesus' beginnings.

The prototype that most readily suggests itself is the Old Testament patriarch Joseph.  Not only is the name the same; both Josephs have a father named Jacob.  It is not certain whether Matthew's designation of Jacob as the father of Joseph in 1:16 is intended to evoke the reader's memory of the Old Testament figure.  But it is noteworthy that the last four members of the genealogical table of the first gospel are identical to those of the third gospel's catalog except for the name of Joseph's father.  Matthew lists "Jacob;" Luke "Heli."  Joseph is like his Old Testament counterpart in at least three other respects; (1) he is chaste and refuses to be involved in immorality; (2) he has dreams in which the future is revealed to him and (3) he rescues Jesus by adopting him and by carrying him to safety in Egypt.  These are of course superficial similarities, secondary to the cardinal events of Joseph's career in the Old Testament: slavery, imprisonment, and enthronement.  Nevertheless, it is specifically these three qualities which are eulogized in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.  The more momentous incidents of Joseph's life have receded, perhaps forced into the background by the messianic expectations surrounding Levi and Judah.  At any rate, the messianic character of Joseph's life is absent; here he is acknowledged by the other patriarchs as a model of virtue: "Now Joseph was a good man and had the Spirit of God in him" (Test. of Sim. 4:1).  Again, ". . . Joseph, my brother, the true and good man" (Test. of Dan. 5:1).  In almost every instance chastity is the basis that is given for this evaluation.  Joseph's life exemplifies the keeping of God's commandments, above all in his triumph over fornication, the sin most confessed and condemned by the other patriarchs.(15) In his own testimony the patriarch vividly narrates the agonizing temptations he endured at the hand of Potiphar's wife.  Little is said of his imprisonment, and almost nothing of his elevation to vice-regent of Egypt; but the experience with the Egyptian woman has been expanded and embellished to the point of completely dominating his last will and testament.(16)

At least two other traits are acknowledged by Joseph: love and long-suffering, and they are combined with humanity.  Noteworthy is his claim, "You see, therefore, my children, what great things I endure that I should not put my brothers to shame" (17:1).  And this is coupled with the exhortation, "You also love one another and with long-suffering hide one another's faults" (17:2).  In the light of these qualities Joseph presents himself as Jacob's successor in caring and providing for his brothers and their children.  Only Joseph can assume this position because he is the only son among the patriarchs who "was like Jacob in all things" (18:4).  The words attributed to him are important in this respect for they represent him as the grand patriarch: 

Dreams are not explicitly mentioned, but a vision is included which offers an apocalyptically colored glimpse of the final events of the age.  More significant is Joseph's reference to a revelation received through an angel of God which warned him of the devices of Potiphar's wife: "Now therefore know that the God of my father has disclosed your wickedness to me by his angel" (6:6).  Throughout the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs the angel of God reveals what has been done or what will happen. 

Matthew's portrayal of Joseph bears a resemblance to the Old Testament patriarch, but the corresponding features have not been derived from the original narrative in Gen. 37-50.  He seems rather to have been invested with a character that parallels the more contemporary image of Joseph presented in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, particularly the Testament of Joseph. 

Chaste, righteous and kind, Joseph is called to adopt Mary's child in order to engraft him into his family tree.  He does so by giving the boy a name and thereby publicly declaring himself to be his father (1:25b).  He is called Jesus, "for he will save his people from their sins" (1:21).  This saving work is primarily nationalistic in character and scope: he is to be the savior of his people, the Jews.  Joseph, therefore, by adopting Jesus upholds the continuity of the Davidic line and the divine promises, which have accompanied it for many generations. 

At the same time, however, Jesus is more than the Son of David.  His commission reaches beyond Davidic messianism.  He is to save his people from their sins.  Nowhere is such a function ascribed to the Old Testament king or his promised heir.  It is said in 2 Sam. 3:18 that by David's hand God would save Israel from their enemies.  To save from sins is a work, which is restricted to the Lord, as is evident from Ps., 130:8, the Old Testament parallel closest to 1:21b, "And he will redeem Israel from all his lawlessness."  Such an irregularity, however, is in keeping with the ambiguity of Jesus' origin.  According to 2 Sam. 7:11-4 and Ps. 2:7, David's heir is to become God's son by adoption.  The very opposite takes place in the first gospel.  Jesus, a new creation of the holy Spirit and as a result the divine Human Being is adopted by David's descendant Joseph in order to fulfill the promises made to Israel, "… and he called his name Jesus." 

As Joseph upholds the continuity of Israel's history and the fulfillment of the Davidic promise, Mary is the bearer of this eschatological event of a new creation and the radical discontinuity it interposes.  In the fulfillment quotation, as already indicated, she is identified as "the virgin."  According to the introductory formula of 1:22, this whole thing happened in order to fulfill God's word spoken by the prophet.  But that cannot include the virgin birth for Matthew does not seem to have known such a theologoumenon.  It is not the doctrine of the virgin birth that led the evangelist to Is. 7:14.  There is another meaning and purpose to Matthew's abrupt interruption of the narrative and his identification of Mary as "the virgin." 

In its reference to "the virgin" the fulfillment quotation of verse 23 corresponds to the Septuagint version of Is. 7:14.  The original Hebrew text, however, does not convey such a designation for it does not utilize the technical term for virgin, bethulah, but simply the word almah ("young woman").  It is very likely that the Septuagint translation interpreted this young woman to be the corporate motherhood of Israel that had already found expression in such forms of address as "Daughter of Zion," "Rachel" and "Virgin Israel."(17) Israel is "the virgin" because she has not defiled herself through unfaithfulness and idolatry; and she will give birth to the messianic king. 

Matthew appropriates this Septuagint version of Is. 7:14 in order to identify Mary in the light of her extraordinary maternity as the incarnation of Mother Israel.  She represents the corporate motherhood of God's people giving birth to this incongruous Messiah. 

Jesus therefore is the integration of both discontinuity and continuity.  As the child of Mary he is a new creation generated by the holy Spirit.  As the adopted son of Joseph he is a descendant of David and Abraham.  The ambiguity of his origin corresponds to the two generations of the third division of the genealogy, which he simultaneously fills, as well as the eschatological tension between the two numerical schemes of verse 17 that serve as the framework of his table of ancestry. 

This dual origin and its concomitant identities: the Son of the Human Being and the Son of David, explain Matthew's strange account of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  In contrast to Mark's version, Jesus rides on two beasts, an onos which is a coronation animal, and a polos huios hypozygiou, a pack animal. This is not, as is often thought, a misunderstanding of the poetic parallelism of Zech. 9:9 but rather a dramatic reminder of the christological identities which Jesus bears and the dialectical eschatology which they express. 

Although he represents two generations and wears two christological hats concurrently, he is one person and has one name, Jesus.  This is the name, which the angel commanded Joseph to give Mary's child because "he will save his people from their sins."  Since the verb sosei ("he will save") is an etymological pun on the Hebrew meaning of the name of Jesus, and since it is not explained as, for example, Immanuel is in 1:23, it must be assumed that Matthew's readers were familiar with it.(18) The Septuagint translation of Ps. 130 (129): 8 appears to be quoted here.  The differences between it and its rendition in Matthew can be accounted for on the basis of the evangelist's purposeful alteration.  The substitution of the verb "he will save" for "he will redeem" is his work and not the result of an adoption of pre-Matthaean tradition.(19) There can only be one reason for it; it is the verb that coveys the meaning of the name Jesus. 

He is to be called Jesus because he will save.  His life will manifest a direct correspondence between his activity and his name, between his person and his work.  That is why his naming is so important.(20) It anticipates what is yet to be told in this "Book of Origin." 

 1. See Marshall D. Johnson's excellent study, The Purpose of Biblical Genealogies, with Special Reference to the Setting of Genealogies of Jesus, Cambridge: at the University Press, 1969, esp. pp. 153, 176ff. Unfortunately Johnson reads the peculiarities of Matthew's genealogy in the light of a polemical setting of Jewish slander rather than the evangelist's design of numerical schemes, which are eschatologically oriented. See H.C. Waetjen, "The Genealogy as the Key to the Gospel according to Matthew," JBL 95 (1976), pp. 205-230. Also C.T. Davis, "The Fulfillment of the Creation: A Study of Matthew's Genealogy," JAAR 41 (1973), pp. 520-535.

2. Waetjen, op. cit., pp. 216-218.

3. G.F. Moore, "Fourteen Generations: 490 Years," HTR 14 (1921), p. 98.

4. Johnson, Genealogies, p. 180. G. Kuhn, Die Geschlechtsregister Jesu bei Lukas und Matthäus, nach ihrer Herkunft untersucht," ZNW 22 (1923), pp. 221-222, suggested the common denominator of a violent death which the three kings shared but recognized that this included Amon (Matt. 1:10) who was not eliminated from the genealogy. E. Lohmeyer, Das Evangelium des Matthäus. Kritisch-exegetischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, arranged & edited by W. Schmauch,

Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 3rd ed. 1962, p. 3, suggests the omission is due to the inexactness of the LXX.

5. G. Strecker, Der Weg der Gerechtigkeit. Untersuchungen zur Theologie des Matthäus, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1962, p. 38, n. 3. Also R. Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, New York: Harper & Row, 1963, p. 356.

6. Rodney T. Hood, "The Genealogies of Jesus," Early Christian Origins: Studies in Honor of H. R. Willoughby, ed. by A. Wikgren, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961, p. 10.

7. J. Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975, pp. 293-295.

8. Lohmeyer, Matthäus, p. 3.

9. K. Stendahl, Matthew. Peake's Commentary on the Bible, rev. ed. ed. by M. Black and H.H. Rowley, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962, pp. 770-771, para. 674c. This possibility, as far as I have been able to determine, was first posed by von Hofmann, Weissagung und Erfüllung im Alten und Neuen Testamente, Nördlingen: C.H. Beck, 1841-1844, vol. 2, p. 42, who considered it at least probable that Jesus was intended by Matthew to be the thirteenth generation and the risen

Christ who would come again as the fourteenth. See also T. Zahn, Das Evangelium des Matthäus. Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, Leipzig: A. Deichert, 2nd ed., 1905, p. 53, n. 19.

10. See the summary in Johnson, Genealogies, pp. 152-179.

11. See also 2 Kings 8:12, 15:16; Hos. 14:1; Amos 1:13; Is. 40:11.

12. Also 1 John 3:9 and 5:1.

13. Although "the Son of God" is a significant title, it is subordinate to "the Son of Man." Contrast J.D. Kingsbury, Matthew: Structure, Christology, Kingdom, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975, who argues for the primacy of "the Son of God" title in Matthew's christology.

14. T.H. Robinson, The Gospel of Matthew. Moffat New Testament Commentary, New York: Harper & Row, 1951, p. 3.

15. T. Reuben 4:6-9, 11 and 6:1-4; T. Sim. 5:1-3; T. Jud. 14:2 - 15:6 and 18:2; T. Jos. 3-10. Also CD 2:14-21 and 4:17; Sirach 9:2-9 and 19:2.

16. T. Jos. 10:2-4.

17. W.H. Brownlee, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the Bible, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 274-281.

18. Strecker, op. cit., p. 54 and especially his reference to Philo, de mut. nom. 121, which shows that the meaning of Jesus could be presupposed in Hellenistic Judaism.

19. Against Strecker, ibid., p. 29.

20. Hans Kosmala, "The Conclusion of Matthew," Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute, 4 (1965), p. 142, "Matthew describes the name-giving and its significance in greater detail than the other evangelists."

Understanding is not simply a way of knowing; it is a priori a way of "being-in-the-world". This, in essence, is the paradigm shift that hermeneutics has undergone during the past seventy years as a result of Martin Heidegger's unveiling of the ontological conditions of understanding. The fundamental reality of human existence is not "being with", an orientation that would imply the question of the other and move the problem of understanding in the direction of epistemology.(1) It is instead the reality of being-in-the-world, a condition that involves "the power to be" which makes understanding possible. "Dasein", with its Heideggerian characterization of "being thrown" into a particular historical context with all of its traditions, norms and conventions, "has already projected itself and it remains in projection as long as it is."(2) Understanding is primordially this projection of Dasein, of being-in-the-world, and its basic function is to orient the self as it inhabits the world with its fundamental sense of "belonging to" (Zugehörigkeit). As an ontological reality, therefore, understanding is not the result of interpretation; rather understanding precedes interpretation and indeed makes interpretation possible.

Formerly, however, hermeneutics in its revolutionary 19th century development under Schleiermacher and Dilthey was established with an orientation toward "being with" that implied a dialogical relationship between an interpreter and a subjectivity that had externalized itself in a text. The hermeneutical objective was the reconstruction of the other's thought expressed in the text. The operations of understanding in relation to the interpretation of the text was determined by a technology of methodology which, according to Age of Enlightenment ideology, was substituted in place of prejudice, tradition, and authority and therefore guaranteed the objectivity of the enterprise and the truth of its results.

But the epistemology of Cartesian dualism with its foundational purification of the mind, even in its Kantian reconstitution, is unable to establish an ultimate grounding for the human sciences. No Kantian or neo-Kantian critique can provide an epistemological foundation for the operations of a hermeneutics that is oriented toward an understanding of the other on the basis of "being with" for the simple reason that the recovery of the mental life of an other by psychological explanation is scientifically impossible.(3) Moreover, methodology is unable to operate neutrally because prejudices and preconceptions cannot be bracketed in the preunderstanding, and in fact they determine the questions addressed to the text as well as the methodology employed for interpretation.(4)

The hermeneutics of "being with" an other ironically required the arbitrary distanciation of neutrality. With a priori alienation (Verfremdung) from the text as the starting point, the intelligibility of mind, laboring in and through methodology, would transport the interpreter into the realm of another time and place and by the determination of meaning in relation to a specific historical context would illuminate the obscure text. Understanding would finally be achieved by means of the technology of interpretation.

The reality of being-in-the-world, however, is prior to "being with" an other, and the understanding it projects precedes interpretation. At the same time the condition of "belonging to" (Zugehörigkeit) ontologically supersedes alienating distanciation (Verfremdung) as a fundamental presupposition of hermeneutical theorizing. Understanding and "belonging to" are concomitant realities of the ontological ground of being-in-the-world. As Paul Ricoeur has expressed it, "History precedes me and outstrips my reflection; I belong to history before belonging to myself."(5)

Consequently the prejudices and traditions acquired in and through a pre-reflective belonging to history constitute the understanding, or rather the preunderstanding, which the self projects to orient itself in the world. This projection of the preunderstanding is an event, a happening; and it is universal.(6) No understanding is possible without the projection of the prejudices and traditions of the preunderstanding. Some of them are blinding and distort the subsequent activity of interpretation; others are berechtigt, justifiable, because they promote intelligibility and perspicacity.(7) Discriminating between them is a developmental process that occurs in and through the experience of testing them in the activity of interpretation.

While "belonging to" is the a priori hermeneutical condition, alienating distanciation is its dialectical opposite and, according to Gadamer, is engendered by the interpreter's "effective historical consciousness" (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein). That is, "effective historical consciousness" makes the reader aware of the finitude of her or his horizon with its inherent limitations of vision and simultaneously therefore also of an alienating distance from the text.(8) Or, to use the words of Paul Ricoeur, "To interpret is to render near what is far (temporally, geographically, culturally, spiritually)."(9) Dasein naturally orients itself to any text and with its projection of preunderstanding initiates the interpretive process. "Belonging to" negates all neutrality and objectivity, but possibly also alienating distanciation, as the interpreter is drawn into the text and the play of interaction begins. The text's alterity will only be experienced if the dialectical dynamic of "belonging to" and "alienating distanciation" has been activated by "effective historical consciousness".

Distanciation, according to Paul Ricoeur, is a natural property of all speech events, oral and written.(10) At least two occurrences of this condition may be differentiated in the movement from oral discourse to the reading of a text. The first happens in the passage from language (langue) to speech (parole): "from the linguistics of a code to the linguistics of a discourse".(11) Someone makes an utterance, says something about something, sends a message to another person. As language is actualized in speech in order to express meaning, a linguistic event takes place. The event itself is transitory, and it is surpassed by the utterance that was spoken. In the difference between what is said (the message) and the saying of it (the event) the first distanciation occurs. The message with its fullness of meaning may linger on into the future, but distance will be constituted between the event and the message itself.

While this may be true, what is at least equally significant is the closed and determinate construal of meaning at the time of the speech event. The speaker and the hearer share one and the same context. No distanciation is experienced. The condition of "belonging to" and the projection of the prejudices and traditions of the preunderstanding engender immediate understanding facilitated by the constitutive elements of context, code, and contact.

The same appropriation of meaning may also occur in conjunction with the second kind of distanciation that Ricoeur identifies, the exteriorization of discourse in the inscription of a work - a written speech event. Sentences are joined together to form a composition whose identity is determined by the author's choice of a specific genre: poem, novel, letter, gospel, etc. This too is an event, an event of labor and production in response to a particular situation or circumstance, and it is individuated by the author's style and organization of material. A text comes into being, and as it leaves its author's control, it assumes an autonomy of its own, independent of authorial will. The work has surpassed the event of its composition. Yet before it transcends its original context and becomes subject to polysomy, its meaning is determinate and closed to its original addressees who share the same horizon with the author. In spite of the absence of authorial regulation and the distanciation produced by the intermediate contact with a written work, there is a genuine occurrence of rendering near what is far. While the message may be rejected, its meaning, the subject matter which the author intended to communicate, facilitated by the shared socio-cultural context and linguistic code, is appropriatable. Very little, if any, "effective historical consciousness" is required for the actualization of understanding. However, as distanciation increases in terms of time, socio-cultural contexts, and linguistic codes, the alterity of the text becomes opaque and therefore subject to polysemy. Accordingly, "effective historical consciousness" becomes indispensable in summoning explanation as primordial understanding extends itself into interpretation and by the fusion of horizons attempts to render near what is far.

But what is the alterity of the text? It is not simply the fact of the text itself as an objective, autonomous reality.(13) Textual otherness consists in the message or subject matter which the text conveys. But that begs the critical question: what is the message of the text? Is it what the author intended to say or what the text is about? This is Ricoeur's dichotomy, and it is crucial to his hermeneutical synthesis. It correlates with his differen- tiation between the ostensive references of the text to its original context (Umwelt) and the non-ostensive references which are identified with "the kind of world (Welt) opened up by the depth semantics of the text".(14) The relationship of sign to referent and the relationship of sender and receiver respectively do not produce the meaning that Ricoeur identifies as "the world in front of the text". What the text is about is a possibility of being, and this is communicated both unconsciously and consciously to the reader, while engaged with the written discourse (parole) by the generational capabilities of the linguistic code (langue) through the relations of contiguity and the accompanying principles of combination as well as the accompanying principles of selection.(15) Depth semantics is "the product of perceptual structures which operate in the [author's] mind at an unconscious level rather than at a consciously artistic level."(16) Concomitantly the semantic universe of the reader is presumed to be "conditioned to receive and decode the message at this unconscious level".(17) The projection of preunderstanding perceives "the world of the work" which the text discloses and confronts the subjectivity of the reader with "figures of liberation", that is, a new possibility of being. Understanding, therefore, is realized by "exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self", not "by imposing upon the text our finite capacity for under- standing".(18) At the same time, however, there is also a conscious movement "from sense to reference, from what the text says to what it talks about"; and this involves the movement from explanation to understanding. All the semiological systems, along with the linguistic system, must be decoded, and, as Ricoeur says, "that requires a special affinity between the reader and the kind of things the text is about"(19) What is appropriated is not a system of ideas but deep values of truth that are imposed "with such power that no further proof is needed to perceive their validity and reality".(20)

But is the alterity of the text to be identified only with depth semantics, with Ricoeur's "world in front of the text"? What has happened to the message which the author intended to communicate to the original addressees? Is the speech (parole) of the author, as a result of natural distanciation, to be completely identified with langue, the linguistic code of the text? If distanciation prevents the appropriation of every trace of affective affinity with the intention of the author,(21) that would indeed exclude the mental life of the author. But the intention of the author is also a textual reality, expressed in the message which continues to be embedded in the text by the design of the author.

The text may be presented to its readers at face value simply as the literary structure of a linguistic code (langue), but its otherness includes an authorially originated speech performance (parole). The fullness of its subject matter is conveyed as a dialectical textual reality of both the written discourse (parole) of the author and the linguistic code which the author has employed. Differentiating between them and determining their nascency is a hazardous subjective undertaking. Metaphorical, symbolic and allegorical meanings are attributable to both authorial will (parole) and linguistic sense (langue). Whether by authorial design or linguistic polysemy, Dasein's primordial conditions of Zugehörigkeit and its projection of its circular structures of preunderstanding naturally appropriate both, often simultaneously. Even in a circumstance involving two separate contexts or horizons, that of the text itself and that of its readers temporally, linguistically and culturally removed from it, distanciation cannot prevent appropriation from experiencing affective affinity with the fullness of the otherness of the text.

The dialectical textual reality of written discourse (parole) and linguistic code (langue) engenders the great irony of interpretation.(22) For, on the one hand, Dasein's primordial reality of being-in-the-world and its condition of "belonging to" will naturally be inclined to fix itself on the latter (langue) and to understand the sense of the textual signs in terms of the prejudices and traditions of its preunderstanding. Yet on the other hand, there is the textual reality of the author's discourse (parole) that conveys the subject matter of the authorial-willed message. All too often, however, the irony of interpretation remains unfulfilled. Dasein's condition of "belonging to" does not always activate "effective historical consciousness" and its attendant awareness of distanciation, and therefore the otherness of the text is never encountered.

"Shakespeare in the Bush" is a case in point, although in many ways of limited value.(23) Laura Bohannan, an anthropologist from the University of Illinois, offers a delightful account of a hermeneutical experience in the bush which illustrates the operation of Dasein's ontological reality of "belonging to". While studying Hamlet in the West African bush, she was invited to drink beer and share a story with a small group of elders of the Tiv people. Presupposing that there was only one possible interpretation of Hamlet, she decided to test her theory by narrating the story of Shakespeare's tragedy. Throughout her narration she was continuously interrupted by the elders who interpreted the story in terms of the prejudices and traditions which their preunderstanding projected without any apparent consciousness of alienating distanciation. One instance will perhaps suffice as an example. To quote Bohannan as she begins her recounting of that experience:

In this manner the story-telling continued with frequent inter- polations and corrections until the narrative ended. The entire episode, according to Bohannen, was closed by the old chief:

Gabriele Schwab, in her analysis of this hermeneutical event in the bush, acknowledges that the elders "recreated their own cultural pattern within Shakespeare's plot" but concludes, "The Tiv people had to project their own cultural preconceptions in order to reduce the otherness that would have made Hamlet incomprehensible in their context."(24) But is the story so alien and strange that it has no affinity with the culture and experience of the Tiv people? Of course, the village elders, as guardians of the community's traditions and their interpretation, may be constrained to remain within the context of their Dasein and its project. Consequently, any "effective historical consciousness" that might have emerged from their primordial condition of "belonging to" to make them aware of their distinctive vantage point and to open their horizon to the otherness of the story may have been suppressed by the perspective of their hierarchical position in the Tiv polity. In any case, no sense of distanciation manifested itself to initiate an interrogation of the details of the story and to solicit explanation. The world of the text (Welt) did not explode the world (Umwelt) of the author. The preunderstanding of Zugehörigkeit simply projected its own determinate meaning on the linguistic code of the text, producing a vicious hermeneutical circle which resulted in "the recreation of their own cultural pattern".(25) Otherness was transformed into sameness.(26)

Understanding is not the reduction of a literary composition to congruency with one's own prejudices and traditions. It is rather a closure of meaning that has involved an encounter with the otherness of the text. In spite of the skepticism of decon- struction, Gadamer's characterization of the ontology of literary texts seems to be a principle that holds priority over the reality of Jacques Derrida's différance and its dispersion and deference of meaning. "Understanding belongs to the meaning of a text just as being heard belongs to the meaning of music. The meaning of all texts is realized when they are understood."(27) If understanding is a closure of meaning, how is understanding attained beyond the mere projection of Dasein's "belonging to"?

Umberto Eco's maxim, "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemos", which stands as the closure of his novel, The Name of the Rose,(28) is as valid a starting point as any other. Construing meaning begins by recognizing that "we grasp the name empty". That is, the empty linguistic signs of a text are automatically filled by the projection of Dasein's preunderstanding. Being-in-the-world and its "belonging to" necessitate the orientation of the self, but this may be nothing more than reading the text as a code of linguistic signs (langue). If understanding is a closure of meaning that includes an encounter with the alterity of the text, how can the production of meaning comprehend the complexity of the text as both a "cultural speech performance"(29) and a code of linguistic signs?

The former, the text as parole or speech performance, bears its own set of difficulties. Schleiermacher's aphorism of his 1805 and 1809 lectures: "Each word has properly only one meaning - even particles - and one does not understand the variables without reduction to the original unity." Parole, the speech performance of an individual, is a delimiting use of language in which the linguistic signs that are employed bear a single, determinate sense regulated by the consciousness of the author. Nevertheless, at the same time, because of the dynamic relationship between the signifier and the signified, authors may say more than they intend, more than they are conscious of. Accordingly, authorial control cannot be exercised over the construal of meaning, even within a linguistic and socio-cultural context shared by both author and reader. When two contexts or horizons are involved, that of the text and that of the reader, the fusion of horizons becomes a formidable undertaking. Of course, to be repetitive, that fusion is not the assimilation of one horizon into another, but the extension of the preunderstanding's projection to construe the text as both a cultural speech performance and a dynamic code of linguistic signs. While otherness is concentrated in the former (parole), it is extended by the potency and instability of the latter (langue).

A text, therefore, is understood and its meaning is realized when it, the text, is interpreted ironically; that is, when the reader is engaged in a play with both textual realities, speech performance (parole) and linguistic code (langue) and through the process of interaction gradually experiences the otherness of the text. Alienating distanciation, vital to this process of interaction, can be evoked by Dasein's projection of "effective historical consciousness" if a sense of irony is appropriated as an a priori approach to all texts. That involves the acquisition of two sets of ears, one that hears the surface meanings of the linguistic code and one that penetrates the surface to listen to the voice of "the implied author", namely those marks of the actual author's subjectivity that have externalized themselves in the text.

For very likely the text, on a first reading - or more - does not mean what it says, if only because of a more immediate orientation of Dasein's condition of "belonging to" toward the text as a code of linguistic signs. Here is where a hermeneutics of suspicion can operate effectively, enabling the reader to read "against the grain".(31) The objective is to determine how the text as a linguistic code (langue) stands in the service of the speech performance. The richness of the relationship between the two, speech performance and linguistic code, with all the nuances and allusions which the latter provides, those by the design of the author and those by the creative interaction of the reader, can only be realized by an ironic discernment that is critical of Dasein's projection of its preunderstanding.

For, as Heidegger characterized it, human being is a condition of "thrownness", and the sense of finitude which it evokes generates the anxiety about being-in-the-world as well as the anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, the fear of death and the fear of life. On the one hand, the determinism of finitude must be overcome; on the other hand, the infinitude of life and freedom must be controlled. The existential paradox of finitude and infinitude and its creative possibilities are negated by the narcissistic search for power and security. Defensive mechanisms are established to shut out the contingencies and threats of otherness and concomitantly to maintain the peace and safety of sameness.

Accordingly, the same irony of interpretation must be directed at the self's preunderstanding in order to expose those prejudices and traditions which maintain the mechanisms of insulation. The openness to otherness is a condition of inestimable possibility for self-affirmation and self-realization and therefore also the fulfillment of human destiny. That primordial understanding of being-in-the-world, by which human beings orient themselves as they inhabit the world, must be unmasked. Dasein's project must become critically conscious of itself; it must "read itself against the grain".(31) It is only a "reflected projection" that produces "a capacity for otherness" as otherness is encountered in both individuality and multiplicity.(32)

If understanding is a closure of meaning that requires the irony of interpretation to develop an openness to textual otherness, the text itself must not be regarded as a shell-like container from which its otherness can be extracted as a "thing". The alterity of the text, which is identifiable with the subjectivity that has externalized itself in the text in order to communicate a message, is a potentiality that is inherently present in the signs of the linguistic code the author has employed. Those signs or words designate the instructions to the reader for the production of the signified.

The reader and the text are partners collaborating as co-creators in an aesthetic event of understanding that, by generating an experience of meaning, originate something that did not exist before.

If the play of interaction has occurred with an "effective historical consciousness" that has realized a "fusion of horizons", that something is a new "subjectivity"(34) that combines the subjectivities of the author and the reader. Consequently, if this is the valid result of understanding's projection of interpretation, no identical productions of meaning can ever be actualized. But this is not because the text is polysomous - although it is that if simply approached as a structured linguistic code (langue) - but rather because the text, with its authorial instructions, and the reader, with her or his distinctive Dasein and its project, have united in a collaborative effort to create something new.

Unlimited multisignification, however, cannot be justified. Not every production of meaning that may result from this aesthetic interaction is valid. Unless there is an exchange, a transaction with the textual realities of "the implied author" and "the implied reader", the otherness of the text will not be encountered.

The former, the implied author, is "a system of perspectives designed to transmit the individuality of the author's vision".(35) More concretely, it is the sum total of all the decisions an author has made to externalize his or her subjectivity in a literary work in order to communicate a message: choices of narrator, genre, plotline, characters and characterization, repertoire, and rhetorical strategies.(36)

Anticipated by the author, of course, is a reader who is "offered a particular role to play, and it is this role that constitutes the concept of the implied reader".(38) As a textual construct laid down by the author, the implied reader "embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to have its effects".(39)

The more acutely the actual reader can perceive that "network of response-inviting structures" of the implied reader and fulfill that role as designed by the author, the more adequate the construal of meaning will be. Indeed, validity in interpretation can only occur when the otherness of the text, as it is conveyed by the textual structures of the implied author and the implied reader, is realized by the structured acts of the actual reader.

The literary work itself, as a result of the author's creativity, is a "world" of its own, a construction of reality that to a limited extent mirrors the socio-cultural context in which it was created or a particular socio-cultural "world" determined by the choice of repertoire. Because of the selectivity involved in its construction, it is never a reproduction of the empirical world. The deliberate rearrangement of the social norms and traditions is aimed at producing defamiliarization and restructuring the preunderstanding's perception of reality.

The text as an authentically different being results from the author's creative and discriminating speech performance combining linguistic code, genre, style, repertoire and rhetorical strategies. Many or even most of these choices are, of course, time-bound, determined by the socio-cultural context in which the literary work was produced. A genuine fusion of horizons will require the utilization of methods and models derived from other academic disciplines to serve as extensions of Dasein's project. "Effective historical consciousness" operating in and through philological and historical investigation, augmented by the social sciences, will elucidate the horizon of the text and explicate the socio-cultural idiosyncracies of its repertoire.

The alterity of the text, however, is not to be identified with the socio-cultural, economic or religious realities which its linguistic code and repertoire reflect. Vital explanations and elucidations of these realities are produced by the utilization of the theories, models and methods of the social sciences, but, while they enhance the interpretation of the text, they do not represent the otherness of the text. Objectifications of textual and contextual reconstructions, resulting from the employment of the social sciences, are always a posteriori undertakings after the eventful experience of Dasein's "belonging to" has mediated alienating distanciation through "effective historical consciousness" and has constituted a fusion of horizons. The resulting representation of objects can be nothing more than probable conclusions and approximations, for the new subjectivity that has been produced through the interaction of text and interpreter can never become universally true. The knowledge or truth claims that have been constituted are valid for that moment in time(42) but will eventually be superseded by the generation of a new subjectivity produced by another interaction between the text and the interpreter.

However, the truth claims of any interpretation remain deficient and therefore invalid unless they have emerged from an encounter with the otherness, the subject matter, of the text. That implies the operation of a dialectical hermeneutical circle that rotates through "belonging to" and alienating distanciation while interrelating with the textual structures of the implied author and the implied reader and simultaneously incorporating the technology of methodology offered by the social sciences and rhetorical criticism. In this playful interaction with the text and in dialogue with its subject matter the reader/interpreter fulfills the being of the literary work by actualizing its potentiality of meaning. Having begun with a hermeneutics of being-in-the-world, the reader/interpreter culminates the interpretive project with a hermeneutics of "being with" an other in dialogue.

Paul Ricoeur, dissatisfied with the one-way street of Heideggerian ontology that prevents "repeating the epistemological question after ontology",(43) attempts to construct a return thoroughfare back to epistemology.

The ultimate objective of his hermeneutics, like that of E.D. Hirsch, Jr., is the attainment of validity in interpretation.(45) "A text is a limited field of possible constructions" and "...not all interpretations are equal."(46) Validation involves testing the projection of good guesses by determining the probability of the "verbal intention of the text". This is subject to judicial reasoning as all interpretations are brought before a public tribunal of judgment. But the procedures of appeal are never exhausted. "Neither in literary criticism, nor in the social sciences, is there such a last word."(47) Nevertheless, Ricoeur still insists,

Although a text may be considered as a quasi individual, Ricoeur, on his road back to epistemology, avoids any renewal of contact with the hermeneutics of "being with" which Schleiermacher had formulated. "Depth semantics constitutes the genuine object of interpretation..."(49) and this conducts the interpreter into a world of semiotic systems and structural analysis.

Ricoeur's "world in front of the text", which he identifies with the depth semantics of the text, is a world of logocentrism, a world in which the linguistic code of a text, functioning as a semiotic system, has the power to communicate apart from and even in spite of the author's intention.

To what extent, then, has he succeeded in escaping Heideggerian ontology? Language for him, as for Heidegger, is the house of being which by a dialectical movement of the hermeneutical circle through understanding and explanation and explanation and understanding will disclose new possibilities of being.(51)

But the textual structures of the implied author and the implied reader continue to convey the presence of an author.(52) The author, therefore, cannot simply be abolished from the text on the basis of a hermeneutical theory that rejects the recovery of authorial will. While interpretation must legitimately begin with a hermeneutics of Dasein and its projection of preunderstanding's prejudices and traditions, ideologies and methodologies, it must eventually return to a hermeneutics of "being with" an other. Not the other as a psychic life that is to be re-experienced and reconstituted, but the other as a vision or a truth conveyed by the speech performance of an author in terms of a potentiality structured in the text that can only be actualized through the process of reading.

In the dialectic of the hermeneutics of being-in-the-world and the hermeneutics of being-with-an-other there is a movement away from the individuality and isolation of the thrownness of being-in-the-world into a dialogical relationship with an other. Even if that other, materially speaking, is only a text, its subject matter establishes the possibility of a dialogue which not only marks the beginning of community and the collaborative and creative enterprise of generating something new. Moreover, that which is new - a new subjectivity!- poses the possibility of experiencing a defamiliarization of the reality structures of being-in-the-world and with it an actualization of a new self-awareness that is both liberated and liberating.

The truth that emerges in and through this new subjectivity, generated by the interaction between text and reader may be ephemeral, exerting its claim for but a moment. But if it should as objects for the contemplation of the intellect but its objectification in actions and deeds that become embodied in the flesh and blood life of the reader, it will in turn realize a new potentiality: the transformation of the reader's self and the world to which that self belongs. The ultimate objective of the otherness of texts is not merely the establishment of the truth of ideas and concepts constitute integrity and contribute to change in the world.

1. See Paul Ricoeur, "The Task of Hermeneutics", From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991, 65-66.

2. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962, 185; Sein und Zeit, 7th ed. Halle: Niemeyer, 1927, 145.

3. As, for example, was attempted by Wilhelm Dilthey. See Ricoeur's analysis in "The Task of Hermeneutics", op.cit., 56-63.

4. Hans Georg Gadamer, "Problem of Historical Consciousness," in Interpretive Social Science. A Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow and William L. Sullivan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, 151-152. Truth and Method, tran. and ed.

by Garrett Barden and John Cumming, New York: Seabury Press, 1975, 269. Wahrheit und Methode. 4th ed. Tübingen: J.C.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1975, 285.

5. "The Task of Hermeneutics", 72

6. Ricoeur, ibid., 70-74.

7. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 247 ff. Wahrheit und Methode, 263 f.

8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269; Wahrheit und Methode, 286.

9. "Phenomenology and Hermeneutics", From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991, 35.

10. See "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation", From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II, Evanston" Northwestern University Press, 1991, 75-88.

11. Ibid., 77.

12. Gadamer, "Problem of Historical Consciousness," 151-152.

13. Of course, there are some, like Stanley Fish, who deny the objectivity and therefore also the autonomy of the text. See Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1980.

14. Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation", 87-88, and "The Model of the Text", in From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991,

15. Although Ricoeur does not state this explicitly, he does speak of structuralism's analysis of depth semantics, and this is generally the focus of structural analysis. See Susan Wittig, "A Theory of Multiple Meanings", in "Polyvalent Narration", ed. by J.D. Crossan, Semeia 9, Decatur: Scholars Press, 1977, 81.

16. Wittig, ibid., 82.

17. Ibid.

18. Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation," op.cit., 88.

19. "The Model of the Text," ibid., p.164.

20. Daniel and Aline Patte, Structural Exegesis: From Theory to Practice, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978, 101.

21. Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation", op.cit., 87.

22. J.H. Hunter, "Escaping the Abyss: Beyond Deconstruction in Old Testament Studies", Acta Academica 24 (3) 1992, 69. See also his article, "The Irony of Meaning. Intertexuality in Hebrew Poetical Texts", Journal for Semitics 2, 229-243.

Hunter speaks of the "irony of meaning," whereas I prefer to speak of the "irony of interpretation". He focuses on the text's problematic of intentional and unintentional meaning; I focus on the attitude and approach to the text by the reader/interpreter in view of this textual problematic.

23. Laura Bohannan, "Shakespeare in the Bush", Natural History 75 (1966), 28-33. My thanks to my friend, Dr. Royce J. Truex, for introducing me to Bohannan's article.

24. Gabriele Schwab, "Reader-response and the Aesthetic Experience of Otherness", Stanford Literature Review 3 (1992), 127. My thanks to Gregg Lambert for calling my attention to this seminal essay.

25. Ibid., 110.

26. Ibid., 117.

27. Truth and Method, 146; Wahrheit und Methode, 156. What Gadamer has formulated as questions, I have taken the liberty on the basis of his own answers, to reconstitute as statements.

28. The Name of the Rose, London: Pan Books, 502.

29. Schwab, op.cit., 111.

30. See Schwab's application of Lacan's hermeneutical perspective to the problematic of encountering the otherness of the text, ibid., 121-122.

31. See G. Schwab's discussion of Lacan's analysis of "the Other", ibid., 121-122.

32. Ibid., 129.

33. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, 21.

34. G. Schwab, op.cit., 114.

35. W.Iser, op.cit., 35.

36. See W. Iser, ibid., 53-103. on "Repertoire" and "Strategies".

37. Ibid., 35.

38. Ibid., 34-35.

39. Ibid., 34.

40. Ibid.

41. H. G. Gadamer, "Problem of Historical Consciousness", op.cit., 151-152.

42. So also J. H. Hunter, op.cit., 65.

43. "The Task of Hermeneutics",op.cit., 70.

44. Ibid., 69.

45. See Ricoeur's discussion of the problem of validation vis a vis Hirsch in "The Model of the Text", op.cit.,158-162.

46. Ibid., 160.

47. Ibid., 162.

48. Ibid., 159.

49. Ibid. 164.

50. Ibid., 167.

51. Ibid., 156-167.

52. W. Iser, op.cit., 35. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: 4th ed. University of Chicago Press, 1963, 135ff.

53. W. Iser, op.cit. 19.

The institution of jubilee and its economic regulations, detailed in Leviticus 25, may never been put into practice in the history of Israel. But the ideals of redemption and restoration, which it envisioned for the nation's covenantal relationship with God and its attendant establishment of justice, were appropriated and applied by Israel's prophets to the social, economic and political conditions of their times. Jesus' ministry also appears to have been oriented toward the fulfillment of these jubilary ideals. Indeed, the Evangelist Luke presents Jesus enunciating a programmatic vision of the work he has begun to fulfill based on the jubilee imagery of Isaiall 61. His inauguration and actualization of the eschatological reality of "the kingdom of God" expresses central aspects of the redemption and the ethics of the jubilee year. At least two of the parables, which the gospel tradition attributes to him, convey central features of this jubilee model and ascribe them to their referent, the rule of God. The parable of the Wicked Tenants functions as a mirror for the ruling elite confronting them with their eviction from God's vineyard and their replacement by the very pelple they oppressed and dispossessed, the poor. The parable of The Workers in the Vineyard subverts the world of the sub-Asiatic mode of production and its exchange value of labor.

Much of the confusion which scholarly interpretation has generated in its efforts to explain the parable of the Wicked Tenants has been dispelled by Klyne Snodgrass' investigation The Parable of the Wicked Tenants. Many, if not most of the difficulties, which the individual features of the parable posed, have been resolved. Above all the plausibility of the story has been established, and the parable is attributable to Jesus. The owner and planter of the vineyard may be identified as an absentee landlord. Whether he was a foreigner is not indicated; it is of no importance. The conflict in the story is an economic class struggle.

Historical records indicate that for many generations Galilee had been royal territory subject to the control of prebendal domains, that is "stipend" property or grants for income.

The land was awarded to officials of the state who derived their income from it by leasing it to the peasantry for a stipulated rent to be paid in the form of agricultural produce, money or labor. The Zenon Papyri of the third century B.C.E. disclose that the Hellenistic monarch of Egypt, Ptolemy Philadelphus (283-246 B.C.E.) had granted property in Bet Anat in Galilec to his finance minister Apollonius. The estate which he owned as an absentee landlord appears to have been a large holding of grainfields and a vineyard of 80,000 grapevines.. It is estimated that a workforce of at least 25 people was required to carry out the work that was involved in such a large operation, but this seems to be a minimal figure. Herod the Great furthered this kind of latifundialization during his reign in the first century B.C.E. by expropriating large tracts of farmland and selling them to wealthy landowners. Consequently the best agricultural lands of Galilee fell into the hands of a few landbarons who preferred to live in another part of Palestine or even abroad while their estates were managed by oikonomoi and worked by tenant farmer

Rostovtzeff offers a comprehensive view of land tenure in Palestine:
"Judaea, Samaria, and still more Galilee are studded with hundreds of villages
inhabited by peasants, Samaria, and still more Galilee are studded with hundreds
of villages inhabited by peasants, above whom stands a native aristocracy of
large landowners, who are patrons of the villages... Still more opulent are the
officials of the kings and tetrarchs, and the kings and tetrarchs themselves and
their families. Lastly, we find estates of the Roman emperor himself and the
imperial family, and even a military colony established by Vespasian at
Emmaus after the Jewish War. Such were the conditions of life in Palestine,
and in later times there was clearly no change, except that landed proprietors
of other than Jewish origin, like Libanius, increased in number."

Jusus' parable of the wicked tenants supports Rostovtzeffs socio-economic analysis, mirroring the institution of prebendal domains and its concomitant feature of absentee landownership which dominated Galilean agriculture. A landlord has established a vineyard: vines have been planted, a wall has been constructed, a vat has been dug, a tower has been built, the vineyard has been leased to tenants and the owner has withdrawn-most likelly to his place of residence in another area of Palestine or possibly even abroad.

Four of these six initial activities are attributed to the singer of the Song of the Vineyard in Isaiah 5 who is metaphorically identified with Yahweh: that is, planting vines, constructing a wall, digging a vat and building a tower. The leasing of the vineyard to tenants and the departure of the owner move Jesus' story directly into the realities of Galilean agriculture in his own time. Even though the vineyard would not be profitable for at least five years, peasant labor would be necessary to tend the vines and to carry on the continuous process of cultivation and weeding. The expenses that would be incurred during this period of time would be defrayed by growing grain and vegetables between the rows of vines. Rent might also be paid on this produce, but at least five years would elapse before a rent fund would be due on the fruit of the vines. Although no time period is specified in the story, the audience would infer a rather considerable period of tenancy before that first payment was required.

Klyne Snodgrass prefers the originality of Matthew's version of the parable over that of Mark because of the more authentic feature of the landowner's sending of a number of slaves to collect the rent: "Now when the season of the fruit drew near, he sent his slaves to the tenants in order to receive his (share of the) fruit. "A single slave, as stipulated in the Marcan account would thadly be adequate. Most likely several would be needed. However, their treatment at the hands of the tenants may reflect Matthew's allegorical intention to make the story correspond to the history of Israelite prophets: "One they beat, another they killed and another they stoned." Snodgrass denies such allegorical redaction of the story, but Jubilees I: 12-13 and Hebrews 11: 35-38 indicate that traditions of the sufferings of the prophets, even though not included in the Hebrew Scriptures, were circulating in pre-Christian Judaism. The treatment of th individual slaves in Mark's version of the story also appears to have been informed by prophetic histoory. It is generally agreed that the verb ekephaiaiosan refers to the fate suffered by John the Baptizer. Moreover, the great number of slaves sent by the absentee landlord may be intended to cover the entire history of Israel and hint at the immense patience of God. Of the Synoptics Luke seems to offer the most realistic account of the tenants' mistreatment of the woner's slaves: "And at the time he sent a slave to the tenants so that they should give him of the fruit of the vineyard. But beating him the tenants sent him off empty. And he sent another slave, but that one beating and dishonoring they sent off empty. And he sent a third, and wounding this one they cast him out." (Luke 20:10-12). The landlord's slaves are humiliated and wounded, but no one is killed. This feature in the Lucan rendering of the tradition is supported by the parallel account of the story in the gospel of Thomas: "They seized his servant, they beat him; a little longer and they would have killed him... He sent another servant; the tenants beat him as well." However, it is the absence of allegory, including the allusions to Isaiah 5:1-7 at the beginning of the parable, that convinces Crossan of the authenticity of the Thomas version over that of Luke.

"...its meaning is clear as a parable of action. It is a deliberately shocking of
successful murder. The story is certainly possible and possibly actual in the
Galilean turbulence of the period. It tells of some people who recognized their
situation, saw their opportunity, and acted resolutely upon it."

Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties of the Marcan account, especially its allegorized features, it is probably closer to the original story of Jesus than any of the other versions. Unlike Thomas 93:1, the owner of the vineyard is not characterized as "a good man." He is an absentee landlord, and, like most absentee landlords in advanced agrarian society, he probably exploited the labor of his tenants by contracting for rent funds of 40 to 50 per cent of their agricultural produce. Frustrated by his slaves' unsuccessful attempts to collect the rent fund, he sends his son, most likely as his representative, to undertake legal action: "They will respect my son." All four editions of the parable attribute this expectation to the landbaron. Only someone who was involved in the ownership of the land could represent him and serve as a legal claimant. Perhaps, as Snodgrass and others conjecture, the landlord had "transferred a small portion of ownership to the son for this purpose."

To prevent any legal action from being taken and to assume possession of the vineyard the tenants kill the son. Perhaps the lapse of time between their entry into a contract with the owner and the murder of his son cover the period of tenure which the law requires for the acquisition of the land. The Mishnaic tractate, Baba Bathra 3:1, legislates that an individual who has no title deeds to lay claim to a property must prove three years of undisputed possession, but title to fields whose fertility is dependent solely on winter rain can be acquired in less time. However, Baba Bathra 3:3 forbids "tenants" as well as "jointholders and guardians to secure title by usucaption." Whether this prohibition was already law in Galilee during Jesus' lifetime is probably indeterminable. At the very least it hints that seizure of land by tenants was being perpetrated. Snodgrass adds another factor that may have influenced the tenants:

"In rabbinic law, if one abandoned hope of recovering lost or stolen property, he
renounced his claim to ownership. To this point the father had been unable to
come to the vineyard, and the tenants must have felt that there was some
chance that the owner would give up. If the father did come and could not
produce evidence evidence, the stronger of the two parties could take
possession."

How did the story originally end? The Thomas version, 93:1-4, closes with the murder of the owner's son, "...they seized him, they killed him," The son is killed because he is recognized as the heir, not in order to enable the tenants to take possession of the vineyard. Moreover, the question and answer of Mark 12:9, Matt. 21:40-411 and Luke 20:15-16, "What will the master of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others," are not included. If the parable had been terminated with the murder of the owner's son, it would have ended inconclusively. There would be no surprise twist. There would be no subversion of world, no mirror of disclosure. The story would simply be an account of a violent act perpetrated by a group of oppressed and dispossessed peasants, as Crossan, Scott and Herzog have concluded. But the closing question and answer: "What will the master of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants, and he will give the vineyard to others!" are essential for the integrity of the story as a parable. To object on the basis that Jesus did not end his parables with a question and answer, as Crossan and others do, is to limit the creativity of Jesus in his story-telling and to overlook similar instances in Matt. 20:15 and Luke 12:20.

Jesus' concluding question and answer convey the unexpected reversal of the episode. Those who dispossessed the heir of the vineyard are dispossessed in turn by the owner, and the vineyard is leased to others. But this surprising twist must be understood in the light of the story's unusual beginning. While, on the one hand, the owner is an absentee landlord who is a member of the affluent upper class engaged in self-aggrandizement through the exploitation of the peasantry, the distinctive introduction of the parable indicates that Jesus is adapting a more the peasantry, the distinctive introduction of the prophetic allegory of the vineyard in Isaiah 5:1-7.

The opening sentence, "A human being planted a vineyard and constructed a wall and dug a vat and built a tower" would almost certainly have evoked the memory of the Isaiah's "Song of the Vineyard" in the minds of Jesus' audience. This in and of itself suggests an irregularity, for it links the identification of the absentee landlord of the parable with the vineyard owner of Isaiah's allegory. To imagine God to be like an absentee landlord would be a disturbing anomaly for Jewish peasants but not necessarily for those who would tend to identify themselves with the absentee landlord and approve of killing the tenants, namely the ruling elite.

But the introduction is all that Jesus' parable and the Isaiah's allegory of the vineyard have in common. The latter explicitly identifies Israel as "the vineyard of the Lord of hosts"(5:7), while the former focuses on the lease of the vineyard to tenant farmers, their contract with the ownrer to pay the rent fund, and the departure of landlord. Jesus' upper class audience would find itself drawn into a story in which they as landowners would be forced to identify themselves with the lower class peasants to whom they lease their lands. For them the absentee landlord would be metaphorically identified with God on the basis of the intended association of the introduction with Isaiah's "Song of the Vineyard," and the vineyard must necessarily symbolize Israel. The tenants therefore, can only be those to whom God has entrusted the vineyard, that is, the guardians of society. By being drawn into this identification with peasant farmers, the ruling elite ironically find themselves in an unaccustomed role. Jesus has lured them into an identification with that segment of the lower class which they exploit for the maintenance of their weath and power by appropriating a grossly unjust proportion of their agricultural produce through exorbitant rent funds. For a brief moment perhaps they may perceive the injustice of the socio-economic system which they themselves maintain. At the same time, they are obliged to see themselves as the tenants of God's vineyard who are not fulfilling the covenant to which they had bound themselves. This double disclosure which is conveyed to them through their participation in the story intimates a circular continuity of cause and effect: Their guardianship of Jewish society stands under divine judgment precisely because of their socio-economic exploration of the peasantry. By being naturally inclined, as members of the governing class, to condemn the peasants for their illegal withholding of the rent fund and their violence of murdering the landlord's slaves and especially his male heir, they would have no difficulty in justifying his revenge, but ironically at the same time they would be poonouncing judgment on themselves for the injustice and violence which they were perpetrating as the tenants of God's vineyard.

Ingeniously, Jesus has succeeded in confronting the guardians of society with their own injustice. The retribution which the tenants suffer at the hands of th landlord and which they readily affirm will be inflicted on them. As they have dispossessed, so they will be dispossessed: "And he will give the vineyard to others." Without this ironic conclusion the story is incomplete and therefore cannot function parabolically.

Jesus does not identify those who will receive the vineyard. Within the context of Mark's gospel they are suually considered to be the Gentiles. But while this is true for Matthew's gospel, the "others" may, in fact, imply the disenfranchised lower classes to whom the evangelist Mark addressed his gospel. Moreover, originally in the context of Jesus' own ministry, the "others" were probably intended to be the very people who were exploited by the ruling elite, the peasants whose agriculture produced the wealth with they were able to appropriate by their office and power. The promise of the jubilee year will be realized. The land will be restored to the dispossessed peasants who as tenants produced the agricultural wealth which the ruling class redistributed for their own aggrandizement.

The recovery of the original function of The Parable of The Workers in the Vineyard necessitates its extraction from its Mattean context. In its present location the parable seves as an illustration of the reversal which Jesus has enunciated to his disciples in 19:30, "But many (who are) first will be last and (the)last first." These words are repeated, but in an opposite order, as the conclusion of the parable; and it is generally agreed that it is a redaction of the evangelist and not the original ending of the story.

The parable of the Workers in the Vineyard reflects the same economic realities of Roman Palestine as the parable of the Wicked Tenants, but specifically the condition of widespread unemployment in Galilee. Large segments of the population had been dispossessed and reduced to destitution as a result of Pompey's reorganization of Palestinian territory. At the same time Herod the Great's expropriation of large tracts of farmland, sold to wealthy landwners or distributed to the officials of his court, had intensified the process of latifundialization. Consequently peasants and tenants, as well as the artisant who depended on them, had only their labor to sell to anyone who wished to hire them.

Jesus's parable, however, focuses on a landlord who goes to the marketplace at 6 a.m.in order to hire laborers, probably, it is speculated, to harvest the grapes of his vineyard. Because the harvest must be completed quickly, he returns to the marketplace several more times. At 9 0 clock and at 12 noon he finds others standing idle and waiting to be hired. He goes again at 3 o clock in the afternoon and finally at 5 0 clock, one hour before the end of the workday, to hire more unemployed people. The explanation of the workers is always the same, "No one has hired us."

All of them are sent into the vineyard to work, and at 6 o clock in the evening the landlord commands the manager to pay the wage. The law required such payment at the end of each day so that the workers could afford to buy food for their families. Those who were hired last are paid first. Herzog interprets this order to be an affront to those who labored twelve hours. "They have been shamed." "By reversing the order of payment so that the last hired receive a wage equal to that of the first hired, (the owner) has told them in effect that he values their daylong effort in the scorching heat no more than the brief labor of the eleventh hour workers. But the affront is not conveyed by the order of payment, but by the payment itself. It is aroused within those who have worked twelve hours and receive the same wage as those who labored only one hour. For the effect of the parable it is essential that those who were hired first will know what wage is being paid to the others. As a result, their expectation is that they will receive more. But all of them receive the same wage, one denarius. Indignant at what they perceive to be an injustice, they protest, but the landlord reminds them that they had contracted for one denarius.

What kind of a landlord is this? Like others of his kind, he owns the means of production, the land. But unlike others of his kind, he does not exploit his laborers by depriving them of the surplus value of their work. "...not only is he just, but most agree that he has acted with generosity toward those hired last." He is just because he has paid those who labored twelve hours the contracted wage. But he is more than generous! Unlike owners of the means of production, he has not extracted the labor surplus from these unemployed laborers in order to increase his profit. Moreover, he develops productivity by hiring more workers, thereby enabling more of the unemployed to earn a living for themselves and their families. But it is not necessary to identify God with this extraordinary landlord. It is the eschatological reality of God's rule that is like a landloord, who, by refusing to increase his own profit at the expense of his hired workers, subverts the exchange value of labor.

William R. Herzog sharply disagrees with this assessment of the landowner. He rightly recognizes that no elite would go to the marketplace to hire workers; that would be the responsibility of the estate manager. Evidently Jesus is ignoring this class reality in order to focus directly on the landlord himself. But is he doing that in order to expose him as "an exploitative and ruthless landowner." Of course, the wage of a denarius for twelve hours of work is minimal, indeed, a subsistence wage. But as Douglas Oakman has estimated, a denarius could supply food for a family from three to six days. It is, in face, the wage that has been agreed upon by both parties, the owner and the unemployed. Generally speaking, of course, the unemployed would have no bargaining power, but if it is harvest time - and the landlord's need for many workers is apparent in the story - those who are being hired would have a degree of leverage in negotiating with the owner. The text indicates that the landlord came to an agreement with the workers, not that the workers reached an agreement with the landlord.

Those who were hired first are indignant. They believe that they have been treated unjustly, for, as they assert, "We have borne the burden and the heat of the day." Naturally they deserve more! Justice would appear to dictate that, in spite of the bargained-for denarius. But what they have forgotten is their own advantage of being hired at the beginning of the day. It is a stark reality that opportunity is not always equal for all people. Yet their needs are very much the same. The distribution of the housemaster is not according to opportunity and its advantages, but according to need. And among peasants needs are equal. They however, are not concerned about the advantages of opportunity. They insist on distribution according to merit or achievement, the merit of having worked all day or at least longer than those who labored only one hour.

Those who grumble and accuse the landlord of being unjust, in spite of the original contract, disclose that they have been infected with the values that come down from the top of the socio-economic pyramid, values which the rich and the powerful foster in order to "divide and conquer" those on whom they are dependent for labor. But the principle that is at work here in this story is the one that Karl Marx formulated, "From each according to ability to each according to need..." Self-interest is invalidated. The needs of each member of the community cannot be ignored in the eschatological reality of God's rule. No advantages of noble birth, inheritance, achievement or merit of any kind determine participation in the distinctive justice and equality of God's rule.

Jesus' parables violated the ordered system of land tenure and economic exchange in the world of his day. The rule of God, which his stories metaphorically disclosed, will undermine the ruling elite's self-serving systemic structures and institutions. Under the expansion of God's rule those who exploit, dispossess and marginalize the weak and the poor, will forfeit all their advantages of power and wealth. In spite of the continuation of the stark realities of the socio-economic pyramid benefiting the upper classes, the realities of redemption and restoration, which the year of jubilee envisioned, will be actualized, not only for Israel but for all the nations and peoples of the world.