The Talents

The Version Most People Were Handed

Ask most congregations what the parable of the talents means and the answer comes back almost word for word. Yahuah gave every person abilities. Some received more than others. Use what was given and He will be pleased. The sermon closes with an inventory. Find the gift. Serve somewhere. Do not sit on the sidelines.

That reading rests on a word that did not exist when Yahushua spoke. In the parable a talent is a weight of silver. Nothing else. The English word talent, meaning a natural ability, came into the language centuries later, and it came out of this very parable. The meaning was borrowed from the story and then read back into it. So the modern sermon takes an accident of translation, builds a doctrine of personal potential on it, and hands that back as the point of the passage.

Most of what surrounds the error is padding. Greek definitions get offered as though a definition were an interpretation. Money changers and trade routes get explained. Coin jars dug out of the ground get held up as evidence. Rabbinic tradition about the safest way to guard another man’s property gets quoted as if it carried weight. None of that interprets an image. It explains a custom. A custom cannot tell a reader what a symbol means. The men on that hillside did not learn their symbols from custom. They learned them from Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings.

And the result flatters the hearer. Nobody leaves a sermon about using their gifts under a warning. Yahushua ended this parable with a servant thrown out into the dark. A reading that produces comfort out of a passage that ends in judgment went wrong at the first verse, because almost nobody asks what question the parable was answering.

The Question Being Answered

The parable does not open the conversation. It answers one.

Yahushua had just walked out of the temple for the last time. Before He left He spent a whole chapter on the men who ran it. The scribes and Pharisees sat in Moses’ seat. They shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. They would not go in themselves, and they would not let anyone else in either (Matthew 23:13). He finished with a line they could not have missed. Your house is left unto you desolate (Matthew 23:38).

Then He walked out. The disciples pointed at the buildings. He told them not one stone would be left on another. They crossed to the Mount of Olives and asked Him privately. When would it happen? What would be the sign of His coming and of the end of the age (Matthew 24:3)?

Everything from there to the end of chapter 25 is the answer. It comes as three pictures, and all three are pictures of the same office.

First, a servant is set over the household to hand out food at the right time (Matthew 24:45). That was priest’s work. The people came to his mouth to be fed the law. Second, ten virgins sit with lamps and are told to keep them burning (Matthew 25:1). That was priest’s work too. Aaron and his sons were charged to tend the lamps in the set-apart place and keep them burning before Yahuah continually (Exodus 27:20-21; Leviticus 24:2-4). Third, servants are handed the master’s goods and left holding them while he is gone (Matthew 25:14). Same office again. Three duties of one priesthood, told back to back on the same afternoon, days after Yahushua called the house desolate. Feed the household. Keep the light burning. Put out what you were handed. And in all three the master leaves, comes home, and calls for an account.

The disciples asked about a building. The answer was about an office.

What the Disciples Could Not Yet See

A house is not desolate because the stones are bad. It is desolate because the men in charge of it stopped doing their job. The stones were coming down as the result, not the cause. What the twelve could not see yet was that the job was already changing hands, and theirs were the hands it was moving to. Peter wrote it out plainly years later. A holy priesthood. A royal priesthood. A people built up as living stones (1 Peter 2:5, 9). That is what Yahuah wanted from the nation at Sinai in the first place (Exodus 19:6). On the hillside that afternoon they had heard none of it. They heard a story about servants and silver.

The Goods, Named Before the Parable Begins

Most readings start at verse 14 and then have to guess what the goods are. No guess is needed. Yahushua had already used the phrase, and had already said what the goods were for, one chapter earlier in the same sitting.

Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods. — Matthew 24:45-47

Same word for the goods. Same master. Same absence. Same return. Same reckoning. And the work is named outright. The servant hands out food at the right time.

Food, in the Hebrew Scriptures these men grew up on, is not only bread. Moses told Israel that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of Yahuah (Deuteronomy 8:3). Amos said the famine coming on the land would not be a famine of bread or a thirst for water. It would be a famine of hearing the words of Yahuah (Amos 8:11).

The household is fed with the word. And Scripture is not vague about whose job that was.

What the Priest Was Given the Law For

The priest did not hold his office to run a building. He held it to carry the law to the people and put it in their hands. Aaron and his sons were given the reason for the office in one sentence. They were to teach the children of Israel all the statutes Yahuah spoke by the hand of Moses. Every command, given so it could be passed on (Leviticus 10:11). Moses’ blessing on Levi says the same thing. They shall teach Jacob thy judgments, and Israel thy law (Deuteronomy 33:10). Ezekiel’s priests were to teach the people the difference between what is set apart to Yahuah and what is common (Ezekiel 44:23). Malachi says it plainest of all.

For the priest’s lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth: for he is the messenger of Yahuah of hosts. — Malachi 2:7

Watch what that verse does with the knowledge. The priest keeps it, and the people come to his mouth to get it. He holds it so he can hand it over. A priest who keeps knowledge and never opens his mouth has not half kept the charge. He has failed all of it.

That is the trust in this parable. Not money. Not natural ability. The law of Yahuah, put in a man’s keeping so that he would put it in the hands of the people.

The prophets were held to the same standard. Ezekiel was told that if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, the people die in their sin, and their blood is required at the watchman’s hand (Ezekiel 33:6). The watchman is not judged for the sword. He is judged for the silence.

The Same Thing Done Once Before, by Priests

Israel had already lived this exact scene. Not as a story. As history.

Ezra was leading a company back from Babylon to Jerusalem, carrying the silver and the gold and the vessels for the house of Yahuah. He did not carry them himself. He separated twelve of the chief priests and weighed the load into their hands. Six hundred and fifty talents of silver. A hundred talents of silver vessels. A hundred talents of gold (Ezra 8:24-27).

Then he told them what it was and what to do with it.

And I said unto them, Ye are holy unto Yahuah; the vessels are holy also; and the silver and the gold are a freewill offering unto Yahuah God of your fathers. Watch ye, and keep them, until ye weigh them before the chief of the priests and the Levites, and chief of the fathers of Israel, at Jerusalem, in the chambers of the house of Yahuah. — Ezra 8:28-29

They carried it the whole way. When they arrived it was weighed again in the house of Yahuah, by number and by weight, every piece, and the whole weight written down (Ezra 8:33-34).

Line the pieces up. Talents weighed into the hands of priests. A charge spoken as the goods change hands — these things are set apart, and so are you. A long journey with the owner absent. A reckoning at the end, by weight, item by item. That is Matthew 25:14-19 centuries before Matthew wrote it.

And the man doing the weighing had already set his heart to seek the law of Yahuah, to do it, and to teach its statutes and judgments in Israel (Ezra 7:10). He weighed silver into priests’ hands for a journey. He had taken the law into his own for the same reason.

The Servants and the Portions

The man travelling into a far country is Yahushua, days from leaving. He is a servant Himself in the telling. And in this same conversation He had already said that the day and the hour of the return are known to the Father only and not to the Son (Matthew 24:36). That is not how a man talks about himself if he is Yahuah.

The servants are the men sitting in front of Him. The portions differ. Five, two, one, to every man according to his several ability. The text never explains why and does not need to. All three received the same thing in different amounts. Not one of them was handed nothing.

Two of them traded. No method is given and none is needed. What they did was move the goods. They put out what they had been given, it passed through other hands, and it came back larger. That is what the word does when a man teaches it. It does not sit still.

Yahuah said so Himself, and He said it about His word:

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. — Isaiah 55:11

Two things in that verse decide this parable. The word has to go forth out of the mouth, and once it goes out it prospers. It does not come back empty. That is what happened to the two who traded. They sent out what they were holding and it came back with more. Neither man made that happen. The word did. Their part was letting it leave their hands. And that explains the third servant. Nothing went out of his mouth, so nothing could come back. He did not fail to earn a return. He failed to send anything.

When the master comes home, the two who traded hear the same words. The one who doubled five and the one who doubled two are praised in the same sentence and given the same charge over many things. The size of the portion never decided the verdict. The handing out did.

The Burial

The third servant did not lose the goods. He hid them.

Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. — Matthew 25:24-25

He hands the trust back whole and calls that faithfulness. He had the law of Yahuah in his keeping the whole time the master was gone, and he put none of it into anybody’s hands. He guarded it. Guarding was never the job.

Yahushua had already named this failure that same week, to the men who committed it. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees. Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. Ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in (Matthew 23:13). Luke records the same rebuke as taking away the key of knowledge (Luke 11:52). A key carried off and a talent dropped in a hole are the same act. The thing that opens the door still exists. Nobody can reach it.

The master does not argue with the servant’s picture of him. He takes the man’s own excuse and shows it does not hold. If the master were that hard, the smallest effort would still have been made — put the money where it would at least pass through other hands. The man did not even do that. The fear was the excuse, not the reason.

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. — Matthew 25:29

Yahushua had said that sentence once before, and the first time He also said what it was about. The disciples asked why He taught in parables. He told them that to them it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, and to others it was not, then gave this line word for word (Matthew 13:11-12). The thing given and the thing taken away is understanding of the word. That settles verse 29 from inside Matthew’s own account, and it settles it as knowledge, not money.

When the Charge Failed Before

Israel had already watched a priesthood lose the office over exactly this. Eli was the priest at Shiloh and his sons served under him. They were sons of Belial who knew not Yahuah (1 Samuel 2:12). They fed themselves off the offerings. They took by force what was not theirs. Their father knew and did not stop them. The state of the whole nation under that priesthood is recorded in one line. And the word of Yahuah was precious in those days; there was no open vision (1 Samuel 3:1).

The word had not been destroyed. It had gone rare. Nothing was coming out of the mouths that were supposed to carry it. The people starved in a land with a working priesthood, a standing tabernacle, and a high priest in office. That is a buried talent seen from the other end. Everything preserved. Nothing fed.

Yahuah did not correct Eli’s house. He moved the office out of it.

And I will raise me up a faithful priest, that shall do according to that which is in mine heart and in my mind: and I will build him a sure house; and he shall walk before mine anointed for ever. — 1 Samuel 2:35

The charge was taken from the house that held it and given to a house that would use it. The boy it went to grew up under the same roof, while the sons who held the office did nothing with it.

That is Matthew 25:28 with names on it. Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.

The Verdict

The parable states its own outcome, and that caps the reading.

Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents … And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. — Matthew 25:28, 30

Unprofitable is the word. Not wasteful. Not thieving. Everything he was given is still accounted for, and it fed nobody. Isaiah said the word sent out would prosper. This servant is called unprofitable. Nothing prospered because nothing was sent.

The disciples asked when the stones would come down. The answer was that the stones never mattered. What made that house a house was the law of Yahuah, held by priests so it could be handed out to the people. The men holding it had stopped handing it out. So it was being taken from them and given to men who would.

Those men were sitting right there on the hillside. Within days Yahushua would be gone and the law would be in their hands. That is who the parable is about. And the test was not how much any of them produced. The test was whether what he was handed ever left his hands.

What a Man Walks Away With

The church version sends a man home to count his abilities. The parable sends him home to check his hands. He is a priest (1 Peter 2:5, 9), the law of Yahuah was weighed into them, and the only question at the end is whether any of it left. A man can fill every slot for forty years and still hand the master back exactly what he was given. The record is clean. The house is empty. That is the third servant, and he never once thought of himself as unfaithful.