Mark 2:23-24

[jack]

Note: The last couple of entries failed to crosspost from DW to LJ. You can see them at jack.dreamwidth.org if you want.

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”

Is this traditionally a sabbath rule? I know work is forbidden, but does it count if you pick something and eat it then? Eating blackberries feels more like play than fun to me.

I've no idea if this passage is put in to defend the sorts of things Jesus did, or to push the point that Jesus could do that sort of thing.

Or maybe it's another case of "the rules Jesus grew up with weren't picky about the same things"?

The same story appears almost identically in Matthew and Luke, but they don't add much to it.

Comments

[liv]

Awesome summary, thank you. I think the picking grain thing most likely comes under harvesting rather than sorting, though sorting is a great miscellaneous category for people who want to prohibit all kinds of random things! Timing: the 39 prohibited categories date back to the Mishnah, so were very likely at least known in Jesus' time, and codified at latest during the lifetime of the Gospel writers.

This story is one I always instinctively understood when we learnt NT stuff in primary school, because as you say Pharisaic Judaism became Rabbinic Judaism, so it was perfectly obvious to me why the Pharisees would have a problem with grain picking. OTOH I was surprised by hearing about the Pharisees objecting to Jesus healing the sick on the sabbath, because pikuach nefesh, duh. But there's quite a few bits of evidence, not only in the NT, that this was fairly late to be adopted as a legal principle.

[pseudomonas]

Also, even later authorities differ on treatment of non-life-threatening ailments. I wonder how well this maps onto modern categories of emergency/elective.