Food and the Kingdom

Carol Wilson’s For I Was Hungry and You Gave Me Foodis a well-researched and illuminating piece of social-scientific scholarship on the New Testament.

Picking up on recent work that places Matthew’s gospel in a Greco-Roman imperial context (e.g., Warren Carter), Wilson focuses narrowly on access to food. How did people get their food? What inhibited their access? How does the gospel of Matthew respond to those problems?

Food shortages could occur, obviously, because of natural disasters, but Wilson shows that they also happened because of the manipulations of the market by wealthy grain speculators: “In the imperial period, some aristocrats entered into the lucrative grain trade business, which changed their view with respect to controlling crop selection. Grain stores well making it a good cash crop, which the wealthy owners could hold back until they could sell it at a higher price to people in an area experiencing a severe food shortage.” Rising prices made food shortages worse. Further, “to increase the amount of grain available for speculation, the large landowners moved to monoculture grain production,” which eroded the land’s fertility (9). 

Control of land was another critical factor. When a wealthy and powerful person wanted land, there was little that a peasant could do to stop him: “aristocrats used the dominant entailment system to wrest control of land from peasants. Often aristocrats who wanted land were members of the ruling council. They could use tax levies (Matt 17:25) to force the less powerful into debt situations (Matt 5:25; 18:23-34) that caused peasants to lose control of their land” (174). When manipulating the legal system didn’t work, they resorted to direct tactics: “Beatings, maulings, and murders were a frequent complaint. Peasants could make complains to the council but rulings were usually in favor of aristocrats. Sometimes the authorities participated in violence to maintain an exploitative relationship” (175). As the wealthy gobbled up more land, peasants were increasingly tenants on lands they had once owned.

Peasants and aristocrats both had ways of surviving famine and food shortages, primarily through storage and social networks, which included patrons, kin, alms (124).

Jesus’ teachings on food and land were not, as many have thought, signs of His attachment to the quaint ways of rural life. By Wilson’s lights, Jesus critiqued the dominant system of food access and, in announcing the kingdom of heaven, taught an alternative system in which no one would go hungry. In the sermon on the mount, for instance, Jesus taught His disciples not to store up reserves but to share and to trust the Father to provide. In place of the self-protective practices of both rich and poor, Jesus introduced a risky system of “general reciprocity” (197). Jesus Himself plays the role of a generous sitones, a grain buyer and distributor, who gives food freely, in His feeding miracles (205). The enemy who sows darnel in his neighbor’s wheat field is attacking a food supply by trying to ruin the crop, which will make it impossible for his neighbor to make ends meet, and allow the enemy to seize the field (182).

I’m not convinced by everything Wilson says. She late-dates Matthew, and tries to interpret the gospel in the context of a speculative reconstruction that involves food shortages in Antioch, the putative location of the Matthean community. And she probably overplays the centrality of concerns for food in the gospel. 

Despite those reservations, Wilson’s book brings to light dimensions of Jesus’ ministry and teaching that have long been missed, and shows in concrete detail how Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom of heaven comes to Israel’s poor as good news.