U.S. President Donald Trump’s “refusal” to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, is “shameful and against Christian values,” according to Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who was among former President Joe Biden’s closest allies.

“I know of no faith that teaches that we should take food away from hungry children, from the seniors and the disabled and the veterans in our community, so that we can hurt our political opponents,” Coons said on the Senate floor on Nov. 4. “But sadly, that’s what our president is doing.”

The senator then turned to a tale from Christian scripture, the parable of the “good Samaritan,” which he told with anti-Jewish undertones, according to Malka Simkovich, visiting professor at Yeshiva University’s Revel Graduate School for Jewish Studies.

Coons, who is Presbyterian, said that “lots of folks know the parable of the Good Samaritan but maybe don’t know exactly what it teaches.”

When asked what one must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus instructs that loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself are the keys. “Then, being a lawyer—I always love that part—seeking to justify himself, the questioner asks the next question, ‘but who is my neighbor?’” Coons said on the Senate floor. “And Jesus tells one of the most radical, challenging and disruptive of his parables.”

As Coons tells it, robbers beat a man and leave him lying on the side of a road. “And a priest—one of the most respected religious leaders in ancient Israel—a priest is walking down the road and turns and passes on the other side,” the senator said. “And then a Levite, part of a tribe of Israel that was known for their holiness and for their descent from the priestly class, he also walks by on the other side.”

It takes a Samaritan, “a member of a community, a tribe of faith, that was considered abhorrent to the ancient Israelites, who stops, who puts the wounded man on his donkey, who cares for him, who takes him to an inn, who treats his wounds and leaves money and says to the innkeeper, ‘I will come back and pay you whatever is required for his care,’” as Coons tells it.

“And then Jesus says, ‘Who was acting like a neighbor?’” the senator said. “To which the lawyer properly says, ‘the one who had mercy on him,’ on the victim.”

Someone who tells the story as Coons did could include himself in the category of the “lots of folks” who “know the parable of the Good Samaritan but maybe don’t know exactly what it teaches,” according to Simkovich.

“Jesus is having an internal conversation with members of his Jewish community, and the people that he is speaking to are people who are committed to practicing the law, whether it’s ethical aspects of the law or more ritual aspects of the law,” she told JNS. “Jesus is reminding them of the importance and the centrality of ethical aspects of the law, but we shouldn’t take this so far as to imply that his interlocutors are denying the importance of taking care of members of society who are marginal.”

The idea of caring for marginal people was “central to Jews and to Jewish values in the first century,” according to Simkovich, who is also editor-in-chief of Jewish Publication Society.

“When Jesus is reminding the lawyer of the scriptural tradition to ‘love the Lord your God’ and also to ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ he is sewing two different verses together, one from Leviticus and one from Deuteronomy,” she said. “He is drawing from within Jewish tradition, and Jews, alongside Jesus, would have agreed that these are very, very important traditions.”

“It’s not that first-century Judaism was utterly devoid of mutual care but that Jesus is lifting this up and reminding a community that would have understood this value and would have been familiar with it,” she said.

‘Misleading’ translation

When Coons specified that the person challenging Jesus is a “lawyer,” a detail he said he “always” loves, the senator is drawing on the wrong translation of the Greek word nomikos, which comes from nomos, or “law,” according to Simkovich.

In the New Testament and in early Jewish literature, that word is used to mean the Torah, she said. “The person speaking to Jesus is a scholar of the Torah, and Jesus likewise is a scholar of the Torah,” she told JNS. “So we have to view this conversation as just that. There’s a mutuality here.”

“It’s an internal discussion about how to understand first, eternal life, and then who is one’s neighbor, but they’re having an internal conversation,” she said. “The translation of ‘lawyer’ is misleading. This is one person who really knows his scripture, asking another person, who really knows his scripture, these questions.”

The story has been used to suggest that first-century Jews “were obsessed with purity, with ritual and with all kinds of practices that distracted them from the core values of empathy and kindness,” according to Simkovich.

“They interpret this parable as essentially saying, ‘Look. The priest, who only cares about purity, and the Levite, who also only cares about purity, they didn’t understand what’s right in front of them,” she said. “They didn’t understand the importance of just helping another person. That lesson had to be taught by an outsider, who was shunned.”

“It’s very easy to take this story and to say something terrible about the Jewish people,” she told JNS. “That’s not actually what the story is about.”

The point of the story, according to Simkovich, is that Jesus surprised his audience, which subdivided into the three “socio-religious categories” of priest, Levite and layperson.

“Jesus is setting us up to expect that the third person who shows up in the story will be a layperson, but instead he surprises his audience by saying ‘a Samaritan,’” she said. “It’s not really about purity at all. It’s just that the Samaritan shows up, and that is a surprise because it takes the laypeople out of the story.”

The story also evokes a verse in 2 Chronicles 28, in which Samaritans, “who were antagonizers of the Jews and vice versa,” take care of Jewish victims, according to Simkovich.

“Even the parable itself is drawing from Jewish traditions,” she said. “It is an internal conversation drawing from within a Jewish tradition.”

‘Historical reality’

The senator’s floor speech implies that the parable about the Samaritan “critiques Jews, who were only helping members of their own kind and not helping members of an ‘outsider’ or ‘enemy’ class,” according to Simkovich.

“That is absolutely what it suggests, and it kind of makes almost a historical argument about the first century,” that the priest and Levite only paid attention to their own, she said. 

There is also “some anachronism” in Coons’s telling of the story, particularly when he said that priests were among the most respected religious leaders in ancient Israel and that Levites were part of a tribe of Israel, according to Simkovich.

“There is no ancient Israel in the first century,” she said. “Ancient Israel is 1200 to 1400 BCE. This isn’t ancient Israel, and there were no tribes.”

“In the first century, it was a different socio-religious context than biblical Israel,” she told JNS. “That needs to be clarified as well.”

“It would be very easy to read this and assume that Jews in the first century only helped and supported their own, and what Jesus contributed to his community was essentially to say, ‘You need to think beyond your blood. You need to think beyond your biological community and family and help anyone regardless of whether they’re in your religious community or within your family or not,’” she said.

“That is not, in my opinion, reflective of the historical reality of first-century Judaism,” she added.

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