Dark Sayings of Old

Almost everything taught about the parables today rests on an assumption nobody states out loud: that a parable is a story with a spiritual flavor, and its meaning is whatever a reader can defend. On that assumption, one teacher says the oil is belief, another says it is works, another says it is the Spirit, another says it is good deeds — and there is no way to settle it, because nothing outside the story is allowed to rule on the story.

The result is predictable. Parables get preached as moral lessons. Details get assigned meanings on the spot. Whole sermons are built on images that were never explained, and the same passage produces a dozen readings that cannot all be right and cannot be tested against anything.

Scripture does not treat this form that way, and it never did.

What a Parable Actually Is

The Hebrew word is mashal. It covers a comparison, a proverb, a taunt, a riddle — and the same root carries the sense of ruling or governing. That is not a coincidence of vocabulary. A mashal is a device that renders a verdict. It is spoken over someone.

Balaam takes up his mashal against Israel (Numbers 23:7). Ezekiel is commanded to put forth a riddle and speak a mashal unto the house of Israel (Ezekiel 17:2). Job takes up his mashal in his own defense (Job 27:1). In every case the form is doing legal work — it establishes something about the hearer that the hearer would not have accepted stated plainly.

Scripture also treats understanding a mashal as a skill that must be acquired, not a reaction anyone can have. Solomon says the point of the proverbs is to understand a proverb and its interpretation, the words of the wise and their dark sayings (Proverbs 1:6). That assumes there is a right interpretation and that a person can fail to reach it. It rules out the idea that every reading is equally valid before the question is even asked.

Scripture Interprets Its Own Parables

This is the fact that ends the argument, and it is the one almost never mentioned from a pulpit. Across the Tanakh, when a parable is spoken, the meaning is supplied. Not hinted at. Supplied.

Nathan tells David about a rich man who took a poor man’s one lamb. David is furious and demands the man’s life. Then the meaning arrives in four words:

2 SAMUEL 12:7 — KJV

And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.

Isaiah sings a song about a vineyard that produced wild grapes, and names the referent in the same breath — the vineyard of Yahuah of hosts is the house of Israel (Isaiah 5:7). Ezekiel is told to speak a parable about two great eagles and a vine, and the interpretation follows in the same chapter, clause by clause (Ezekiel 17:11–21). Jotham stands on Gerizim and tells a parable about trees choosing a king, then applies it directly to the men listening (Judges 9:16–20).

The pattern does not change in the Apostolic writings. Yahushua interprets His own parables, and He does it element by element:

MATTHEW 13:37–38 — KJV

He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man; The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one …

That is a key, and a key is only useful if the lock is fixed. He does the same with the sower, naming the seed as the word and every soil in turn (Matthew 13:18–23). Two parables interpreted in full, in public, with the method on display in both: the elements have set referents, and the referents come from outside the story.

A form that its own authors repeatedly interpret is not a form that was left open.

Why He Spoke This Way

The common explanation is that parables were simple stories told to make hard truth easy for ordinary people. Yahushua gives the opposite reason, and He gives it when the disciples ask Him directly why He does it.

MATTHEW 13:11, 13 — KJV

Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given … Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

He then quotes Isaiah’s commission — hear ye indeed, but understand not (Isaiah 6:9–10) — as the explanation for His own method. The parable does two things at once. It opens the matter to some and closes it to others. It is a sorting device, not a teaching aid.

This ought to stop a reader cold, because it reverses the assumption underneath most preaching on the subject. The parables are not the easy part of the gospels. They are the part deliberately built to be missed by anyone reading without what the first hearers had.

His own description of the form comes from the Psalms:

PSALM 78:2 — KJV (cited at Matthew 13:35)

I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old.

Dark sayings of old. Not new material invented on the spot. Old material spoken in a form that hides it in the open.

The Materials Were Already in Their Hands

One practical fact governs every reading of every parable, and it is impossible to overstate.

The people standing in front of Yahushua had no Apostolic writings. No epistles, no gospels, no commentaries, no systematic theology. They had Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, and that is all they had. So every image He used had to be recognizable from those Scriptures, or the parable would have communicated nothing at all to the people He was speaking to.

A lamp, a vineyard, a wedding, a door, a seed, a shepherd, a debt, a harvest — none of these were blank symbols waiting to be filled in. Every one of them already had a history in the text those hearers had memorized since childhood.

Yahushua says as much about how kingdom teaching works. The scribe instructed unto the kingdom brings out of his treasure things new and old (Matthew 13:52). Things new and old. The old is not optional background; it is half the treasure. A reading that supplies its own meanings from outside the Hebrew Scriptures is not interpreting the parable — it is replacing it with a different one that happens to use the same words.

The Likeness Is to the Whole Scene

A second error is smaller but does constant damage. When a parable opens with the kingdom of heaven is like, the comparison is to the entire situation the story produces, not to the first noun in the sentence.

The kingdom is likened to a merchant man seeking goodly pearls (Matthew 13:45). The kingdom is not a merchant. It is likened to a net cast into the sea (Matthew 13:47). The kingdom is not a net. It is likened to leaven a woman hid in three measures of meal (Matthew 13:33). The kingdom is not leaven.

In each case the likeness is to what happens — the searching, the sorting, the spreading. Fastening the kingdom onto one element of the picture produces conclusions the parable never made, and it is where a great deal of strange doctrine has come from.

Every Parable Answers Something

Parables were not delivered into empty air. They were spoken into conversations, usually as answers, and Scripture is unusually generous about telling the reader what the occasion was. The occasion is nearly always in the verses immediately before the parable — which is exactly where most teaching does not look.

A lawyer asks who is my neighbour, and the parable of the Samaritan follows (Luke 10:29). The Pharisees murmur that He receives sinners and eats with them, and three parables about lost things follow (Luke 15:1–2). A man in the crowd demands that his brother divide the inheritance, and the parable of the rich fool follows (Luke 12:13). A parable is spoken to certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and the text says so before the parable begins (Luke 18:9). The chief priests hear the parable of the vineyard and understand immediately that He spake of them (Matthew 21:45).

A parable is an answer, and an answer read without its question can be made to say almost anything. This is also where whole chapters get severed from each other. A parable that begins with the word Then is not starting a new subject. The chapter and verse divisions were added centuries later by men, and they have separated more answers from their questions than any other convention in the English Bible.

Where the Error Leads

None of this is an obscure technical failure. It produces a specific and predictable kind of teaching, and the pattern is easy to recognize once it has been named.

The first thing that happens is that the meaning shrinks to fit what the teacher already believes. A parable about a priesthood becomes advice about being on time. A parable about a covenant becomes a lesson in being pleasant to people. The Hebrew Scriptures would have held it to its actual size, and the Hebrew Scriptures are the first thing set aside.

The second is that the unexplained symbols get filled in by whoever is speaking. Nobody can leave an image blank in front of an audience, so the man in the pulpit supplies something — and what he supplies is inevitably drawn from his own doctrine rather than from the text. The parable then appears to confirm the doctrine it was just used to illustrate, and the circle closes.

The third is worse than either. Once the meaning has been unmoored, a man can claim to have found a hidden layer in it and there is no way to test him. He assigns his own values to the numbers and the objects, announces that nobody has ever seen this before, and an audience with no standard to measure against mistakes the confidence for depth. It is not depth. It is one man’s opinion wearing a parable, and the parable cannot defend itself because it has already been separated from the only thing that could.

The test is not complicated. If a meaning cannot be found in the Scriptures the original audience already held in their hands, it was not in the parable. It was added, and whoever added it should be asked where he got it.

Yahushua called them dark sayings of old. Old is the word that matters. What is in these studies is not new material discovered by clever reading. It is the material His hearers already had, put back underneath the stories where it always belonged.