Why did Jesus refer to the Sir Phoenician woman as a dog? Hey everybody, I'm Dan Mlelen. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion. And we find this story in Mark chapter 7 beginning in verse 24. And it starts with Jesus in Ty, which is outside of the land of Israel. This is gentile territory. And the narrative represents Jesus as trying to maintain what scholars have referred to as the messianic secrets. And this is the convention of the author of the Gospel of Mark to represent Jesus as trying to keep his mission and his activity under wraps. But it never really works out. So we see toward the end of this verse, he did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice. Verse 25, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a gentile of Serenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go. The demon has left your daughter." And when she went home, she found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone. Now, there are a few things to note about this metaphorical reference to the Sarapheneician woman as a dog. To begin, the perception of dogs and particularly the rhetorical utility of dogs within literature differed between gentile and Jewish audiences. Within Jewish literature, dog was more of an insult. Dogs were conceptualized more commonly as scavengers, as animals that lived on the street. And we see in later Jewish literature the epithet dog being hurled at Gentiles quite frequently. It was insulting. Within gentile literature, dogs were more commonly kept as pets and were more commonly treated as a part of the household. Now, the author of the Gospel of Mark might be playing with that distinction. They might be representing Jesus as talking about taking the food that belongs to the children and throwing it out into the street to the dogs that roam the streets. And then the Saphrophenician woman could be responding from a more gentile perspective and saying,"Well, no, the dogs are under the table. They're already in the house. They're a part of the house. They're next in line." However we perceive it, though, the notion that because the Greek word for dog is dimminionative, it is a loving reference to a family pet or something like that is not really supported by the data. In the coin Greek of this time period, the dimminionative was used most commonly to refer generically to dogs and usually to the dogs out in the street rather than the pets that might be in someone's household, a part of one's household, loved by the household. So the argument that the dimminionive means Jesus is talking about a loved member of the household doesn't really work. Now the woman's response that earns the healing of her daughter is to one show great faith to Jesus but two accept that secondary subordinate status. The woman is saying I accept my place within the ethnic hierarchy that you are presupposing. And so Jesus's response in some sense is saying, "Look at you, a gentile woman who knows her place," which is profoundly problematic. Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say this is racism, as some people have suggested. When we think of racism today, this is usually the notion of race as a question of skin color, but in this time period, race was a question of ethnicity, what nation you belong to, what language you spoke, what cultural conventions you adopted. And so this is definitely ethnosentric. It is definitely asserting subordinate status for a different ethnic group. And so it is to some degree a bigoted response, an ethnosentric response. But I don't think I would go so far as to call it a racist response. But it is definitely denigrating Gentiles and suggesting that while they do have a turn during the life of Jesus, it was not yet their turn. And so they had to wait because they had secondary status in the sotariological economy of Jesus's mission. So it is an unusual and in many ways a troubling and problematic story. I don't think it is as bad as some folks make it out to be, but it certainly cannot be rehabilitated by suggesting that Jesus is referring to the Serenician woman as a dog who happens to be loved by the household. That doesn't really make the story any better. And that also isn't supported by the data. And the fit for this video has been rogue and gambit forever.