The twenty-ninth passage of the Sefer Yeshua is based on Lk 15:8-10. As a result of having compared the notes of various commentaries, the last verse here is slightly different from the one currently in The Exhortations; I will update it in the next edition. The rendering below is the updated version.
29. 1Yeshua said, ‘Suppose a woman has ten silver denarii, and loses one. 2Doesn’t she light a lamp and sweep the whole house, and search meticulously until she finds it? 3And when she’s found it, she calls together her friends and neighbours, saying, 4“Rejoice with me, because I’ve found the coin that I’d lost.” 5In the same way, I tell you, there’s rejoicing in heaven even over one lost sinner who repents and is found again.’
Overview
This parable is part of the group of three that appear together in Luke 15. The focus of each of them is on God’s final reaction to the penitent, rather than on the penitent themselves.
These remaining two parables are not primarily about repentance, because neither coins nor sheep can repent. They are about the lost being found. The main part of this parable centres on the woman searching for what was lost, hence my new reconstruction in the final verse (Luke’s ‘over one sinner who repents’, compared to SY 29:5b, ‘even over one lost sinner who repents and is found again’). When you read the last line in Luke, you get a sense of words being missing, when you realise what the coin’s place in the parable is.
The Silver Coin
In this parable, the Greek word used for ‘silver coin’ is δραχμή drachmē: a drachma. This was a Greek coin, and it is the only place in the entire New Testament where this word is used. Elsewhere, the Roman coin ‘denarius’ is referred to. In the Synoptic gospels alone, the word for ‘denarius’ is used 12 times, but ‘drachma’ is used only once. Unfortunately, I could not find any explanations or even any hypotheses for this.
In an article (‘Why Did the Greek Polis Originally Need Coins?’) by Thomas R. Martin in the Autumn 1996 edition of Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, he says that Greek drachmae were only used in Greece and Asia Minor (modern Turkey). It is therefore odd that drachmae are mentioned here at all, in Luke’s penning of this parable.
In the SY version of this parable, I have replaced ‘drachma’ with ‘denarius’, since denarius coins are what would have been used in the Galilee and Judea, not drachmae.
Paying the poor their daily wage
The drachma, a silver coin of approximately the same weight as the Roman denarius (4.5 grams), represents a very basic day’s wage for the ordinary labourer. Workers were paid at the end of every day, because most people were so poor that they lived hand to mouth.
It was virtually impossible for the very poorest to save up money, so what was earned one day was spent by the end of the next. This is why Torah commands us not to withhold the wages of the poor. Lev 19:13b says,
‘The [daily] wages of a hired worker are not to remain with you overnight until morning.’
To withhold a worker’s wages was viewed as a crime akin to stealing, and was considered a form of economic oppression of the poor. Dt 24:14-15 furthermore commands us,
‘You shall not exploit a hired worker who is destitute and underprivileged – neither your fellow Israelites, nor one of the resident foreigners among you in your land, within your settlements. You must pay them their proper wages each and every day before the sun sets on them, for they are poor, and their very life depends on it; or else they will cry out against you to YHVH, and it will be a sin against you.’
This was therefore the Jewish cultural background to the daily wage, and it’s importance to the poor – it was quite literally a matter of life and death.
In this parable, the woman had ten denarii / drachmae, which implies that she was not abjectly poor, but nevertheless, if that was all she had, she was not far off it. The sum probably represents her family’s meagre savings. The loss of one day’s wage – and therefore, one day’s expenditure on food, necessities and taxes – would represent a significant loss for her. You can therefore understand why she was so desperate to search for it, and why she was so overjoyed to find it.
Some commentators suggest that she was a financially independent women with no husband (e.g. Amy-Jill Levine, NCBC Gospel of Luke). However, if the ten denarii was all she had, it would not have got her very far. There is also no suggestion in the parable that she is a woman with an independent job – we aren’t really given any details of her personal or financial circumstances. I therefore get the impression that it is assumed for the sake of the story, that because of the deliberate lack of details about her personal financial status, we are meant to assume that her family’s situation is not an unusual one; she has a husband, and at the time of losing the coin, she is simply alone in the house.
In ancient Jewish society, it was usually the men who earned the wage, but it was the women who were in charge of spending it on the common needs of the household. They were the ones who went out to the marketplace to buy the family’s food and other daily essentials, and that is probably why the woman in the parable is in possession of her family’s savings.
If you want to understand what the loss of one denarius would have meant to her and her household, take the figure that represents one month’s income for you, divide it by 24 (representing the number of working days in a 6-day working week over the course of a month), and that will be what one day’s wage means to you. You can then understand the impact it would represent if you lost that.
The denarius was made up of 64 mites (Greek lepta, singular lepton). After buying food and essentials, the wife in the family would try to make sure that she kept enough by to pay their family’s taxes and tolls – which in those days were exorbitant and burdensome. These could be paid by either the husband or the wife.
Cultural background: the lamp
Most poor people’s houses had no windows, and the only light that came into a room was via the doorway. Poor people’s homes were therefore quite dark inside, and one of the most essential expenditures was oil for a lamp. Inside the main room, even the poor would make sure that they had at least one lamp burning, and if a family had no money for oil, that was taken as a sign of abject poverty.
You can then understand how the coin was lost – it probably fell out of her hands while counting, and in the poor light she couldn’t see where it rolled off to. You can also understand why she would need to light the lamp to search for it, and sweeping the place would all be part of the meticulous search – the floor in a poor person’s house would be hardened soil or hardened mud, scattered with dust from the soil, bits of straw and the like.
Commentary on each verse
v. 1b: ‘Suppose…’ – this was a common way that Yeshua used to paint the opening image of a story, the equivalent of how we might say, ‘Imagine if….’ (see Mt 12:11, Lk 11:5, 14:28, 14:31). The Greek literally says, ‘What woman having ten drachmae, suffers the loss of one drachma.’ The Greek τίς (tis: what) in this context has the sense of ‘suppose’.
v. 1c: ‘… a woman’ – Just as in the twin parables of the mustard seed and of the leaven (SY 24 and 25 respectively), the last two parables in this section have a woman and a man as the main protagonists. The man and the woman in these remaining two parables both represent God searching out the lost. It is possible that short parable couplets might have been part of Yeshua’s personal preaching style, one containing a man, the other a woman (Robert Stein, Commentary on Luke).
Because the God of Israel is neither male nor female, it was not unusual to occasionally use female life-circumstances and metaphors to explain God’s character, as a kind of balance to male metaphors in other parts of the Bible (e.g. Isa 42:14, 49:15, 66:13, Hosea 11:3-4, Dt 32:11-12, 32:18, Ps 131:2, 123:2).
v. 1d: ‘has ten silver denarii, and loses one’ – the Greek verb used for ‘to lose’ (ἀπόλλυμι apollumi) suggests a very serious loss (hence the implied assumption that she is not part of a wealthy family). It is used elsewhere to describe the loss of a soul to a state of misery (Jn 3:16, 1Cor 1:18). The verb is also used metaphorically to suggest the loss of a disciple, who turns away from a good life to a life of sinfulness. The author of Luke has therefore deliberately chosen a Greek word for ‘lose’ which has these sombre connotations in other contexts.
We are faced with several possibilities about the woman’s financial status, and where the silver coins might have come from:
1. She is a widow, and is independently wealthy (in which case the loss of one denarius isn’t much of a loss, and doesn’t explain the intensity of her search)
2. It is from her dowry she received when she was married (in which case there isn’t much left)
3. She is relatively poor, and the money represents her family’s savings
The amount of money isn’t much – it only represents what would amount to just under 2 weeks’ basic wages in our economy. She wasn’t wealthy like the father in the first parable. The most serious loss out of the three possibilities above, would be if the money represented the woman’s family savings, hence the urgency and meticulousness of her search.
It is perhaps also significant that it is a valuable silver coin that is lost, and not a bronze lepton (the smallest value coin used in the Holy Land in those days). Each soul is equally precious to God – all the coins are silver, i.e of equal value, and one goes missing.
In the parable of the prodigal son, one of two was lost; in this parable, one of ten is lost; in the next parable of the lost sheep, one of a hundred is lost. It is almost like a reverse version of when Abraham bargained with God in Gen 18:23-32.
What if one in ten is lost, will you go looking for them?
– If only one in ten is lost, I will go looking for the lost.
Then what if the lost is one in a hundred?
– Even if the lost is one in a hundred, I will still go looking for the lost.
It doesn’t matter to God – whoever is lost, no matter what part they make up in the greater whole, is of equal importance. No matter how small a part they play in the greater scheme of things, it does not diminish their importance to God. All of us count, no one is lost to God, and God overlooks no one.
In Jewish culture, we don’t physically count or enumerate people (something is used instead to represent an individual, like a token or a ballot, and this is what is counted). This custom is to emphasise that we should not diminish the importance of human beings by reducing them to a mere number. God alone is able to count us.
v. 2a: ‘Doesn’t she light a lamp’ – this might suggest that she could not afford to have a lamp burning all the time, even in a dark house without windows; she could only light a lamp when it was absolutely necessary.
v. 2b: ‘and sweep the whole house, and search meticulously’ – What she would have used in order to sweep the place might have been a very simple hand-broom – perhaps a bunch of palm twigs (Bock, Comm. Lk) tied together, without a handle. She would have been on her hands and knees sweeping under the bed-pallet, every dark corner, and behind every large clay storage jar on the ground, in order to find the lost coin. The emphasis here is on the detail of her search – the effort she puts into her search, just as God does. The search is no trivial matter.
v. 2c: ‘until she finds it’ – Just as the woman in the parable does not give up, so too God does not give up on us. The verb used for ‘find’ (εὑρίσκω heuriskó) is specifically used for finding something after having looked for it (as opposed to finding something by chance).
v. 3a: ‘And when she’s found it, she calls together her friends and neighbours’ – the words used for ‘friends’ and ‘neighbours’ (φίλας filas and γείτονας geitonas respectively) are both feminine. The woman in the parable specifically calls together her female friends and neighbours. Presumably this happens in the daytime, when all the menfolk in the neighbourhood are away at work in the fields. Although it is not explicitly mentioned, she probably invites her friends and neighbours to celebrate with a small meal of what is readily available in her house – this unmentioned detail would parallel what happened in the previous parable of the prodigal son, where the father lays on a banquet.
v. 4: ‘Rejoice with me, because I’ve found the coin that I’d lost’ – just as the father rejoiced in the last parable, calling together guests to rejoice with him, so too the woman rejoices in this parable by calling together her friends and neighbours. The woman apparently has sufficient provisions in her home to host a small celebration – she probably uses up whatever food she has already bought and stored up, to put on a small celebration for her friends and neighbours.
v. 5a: ‘In the same way, I tell you’ – this way of speaking is very much a signature of Yeshua’s personal, idiomatic style of speaking (another variation was, ‘Believe me I tell you’)
v. 5b: ‘there’s rejoicing in heaven’ – The use of ‘in heaven’ is a circumlocution for God, not an alternative to God. Rejoicing ‘in heaven’ means that God is involved the rejoicing. Luke has, ‘there is rejoicing before the angels of God’ – again, this does not imply that God is on the sidelines, but rather that God is fully involved in the act of rejoicing. In these two parables (of the lost denarius and the lost sheep), the detail of the woman and the man rejoicing, and therefore the fact of God’s rejoicing, is an important, central element.
v. 5b: ‘even over one lost sinner who repents and is found again’ – This is a reconstruction, made in order to fully bring home the message of the lost being found – I am certain this would have been the original. Otherwise, Luke’s original doesn’t quite reflect the same strength or emphasis on the verse’s central point of the lost being found; it only has, ‘there’s joy . . . over one sinner repenting’, and that’s it.
God’s Investment in us
Imagine a Being of pure Love. Imagine such a Being with nothing to love. Therefore imagine created beings fashioned to fulfil that need – us. Now imagine what it would be like if this Being of pure Love lost one of us.
I remember a time when I stayed with an overseas friend of mine and his family for several months. On one occasion, I accompanied him, his wife and his two small children to a fairground. At one point the oldest of the two children, a boy of 12, went missing. My friend’s wife stayed with the youngest, only a baby, and my friend and I separated to go looking for the boy. I saw the worried expressions on their faces, and it spurred me on to help find the boy as soon as possible.
After about ten minutes I eventually found their son, playing outside the back of a children’s dance-tent, completely oblivious to the worry he had caused. I took him back to his very relieved mum, and then I went to find my friend to tell him the good news. I eventually found him inside the tent, where parents were watching their children dancing. Before I reached him, I caught the anxious and scared expression on his face, and it struck me deeply. Since then, whenever the issue of missing children comes up in a TV drama, I think back to them, a worried mother and father, and how scared they were when they thought they had lost their son.
The woman in this parable, desperately searching for her lost coin, reminds me a little of our search for the boy. I know that the coin is an inanimate object, but it doesn’t diminish the importance of what is lost. The search itself represents God looking for us when we are spiritually lost, God’s emotional investment in us when we go astray, and God’s unbounded joy when we are found.