Finally, Meat! Feasts in Jesus's Day

when the lost son comes home in Jesus's parable, his father kills the fattened calf. Anyone listening would have gasped. Here's why.

Your cousin is getting married, so your family kills a goat. That's huge. Meat was expensive, and most people only ate it at feasts and holidays. This is your first meat in months.

And it isn't tender. Bones from ordinary homes in Jerusalem show that regular people got their meat from older animals. You chew. And chew. Uncle Eli is still on his first bite.

Notice what's missing: pork. At Capernaum, and in Jerusalem's city dump, archaeologists found no pig bones at all. Pigs are something you'd only see in the Greek towns across the lake.

That's why the parable hits so hard. Before he comes home, the son is so broke he's feeding pigs, and so hungry he wants to eat their food. For a listener like you, that's about as low as it gets.

Then he walks home, and his father doesn't hand him a tough old goat. He calls for the fattened calf. Young, rich meat. The kind you've never tasted.

That's the point of the story. The welcome is outrageous.

Eli finally swallows, and grumbles that the son didn't deserve it. Which, Eli, is the whole point. Because