Deepening our engagement with Palm Sunday through the Hebrew Bible

Truly, a Holy Day

I am struck by the triumphal entry and its rich use of the Hebrew tradition. An ancient audience would be, too. In all my writing on the topic of first century Judaism and its practical background to the Jesus movement, festival traditions are among my favorite to study because for these holy days, the ancient authors pulled out all the stops! The Revised Common Lectionary offers three readings for this Sunday, and here I focus on the Matthean account and its sophisticated effort to portray Jesus robed in monarchic, messianic, and eschatological garb.

Matthew and Jewish Tradition

The Matthean text is dated between 80-90 CE and includes 90% of the material in Mark, but expanded and refined to serve rhetorical aims. Recall, the view called Marcan Priority suggests that Mark was the earliest of the gospels (late 60s-early 70s CE), serving as a basis for Matthew and Luke, along with an independent source called Q, named for the German word quelle, or source. Q is hypothesized to be an independently circulating source of preserved Jesus sayings.

The Matthean author writes with highly technical use of Greek, speaking with strong knowledge of and attachment to jewish Scripture, tradition, and belief (JANT). The Matthean author depicts Jesus as engaged in jewish interpretive methods to derive authoritative rulings. Paradoxically, the Matthean author, steeped in jewish belief, presents the priestly class and Temple authorities as especially devious. JANT suggests this characterization is owing to competition between the jewish Matthean community and its desire to critique competing jewish sects on offer in the late first century, following the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Judas and the deal with the priests to turn over Jesus is an example of this rhetoric.

Those of you reading Professor Levine’s book through our discussions in this Substack publication will be familiar with some of these insights.

The Text: Matthew’s Triumphal Entry

Matthew 21:1-11:

When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:

“Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
    humble and mounted on a donkey,
        and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!
    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

On Hosana

The call, Hosana, save us, help us, deliver us, from Psalm 118, is a familiar song of victory and celebration that is still used in jewish festival liturgy today. Verse 26 is connected explicitly to King David, a major figure in the Hebrew tradition. Along with Abraham and Moses, David is one of the eternal covenant makers. David was an anointed one, specially commissioned by God. The birth narrative of Jesus, as told by Matthew, includes several connections to David, his house and lineage, and the eternal covenant between God and the throne of David. Here, Hosana and the call for help may bring to mind for jewish audiences an episode reported in the book of Second Samuel: “When the woman of Tekoa came to the king [David], she fell on her face to the ground and did obeisance and said, “Help, O king!”

Here, the Matthean author is suggesting that Jesus may be called on for help, as David provided to his people. Interestingly, that scene from Samuel is rich with drama, and both in Samuel and here, the people look to the anointed one, commissioned by God (David; Jesus) for help. In the Samuel narrative, it is one woman who pleaded with David, whereas Matthew puts this call in the mouth of the whole community.

Matthew 9:21 continues this rich connection, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Again, borrowing from the victory Psalm 118:26, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. We bless you from the house of the Lord.”

On the Cloaks and Branches

Only in the context of the fourth gospel do we read of palms. In the Matthean account it is reported this way: “A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.” The branches may remind the ancient audience of another account from the Hebrew writings, Second Kings 9:13, following the proclamation that a man, Jehu, would become King of Israel, “they all took their cloaks and spread them for him on the bare steps, and they blew the trumpet and proclaimed, “Jehu is king.’” This is typical, says JPS, of a coronation, as reported in the Hebrew writings.

The branches may suggest Sukkot, another Jewish pilgrimage festival that connects with the Exodus tradition (the tradition behind Passover, the reason Jesus is in Jerusalem). The sukkah, the feature of Sukkot, is a temporary, nomadic dwelling place purportedly erected while the Jews were in the wilderness. The cultic practice for Sukkot includes bundling cut branches of different varieties.

Leviticus 23:39-40:

“Now, the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the produce of the land, you shall keep the festival of the Lord, lasting seven days, a complete rest on the first day and a complete rest on the eighth day. On the first day you shall take the fruit of majestic trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days.

On the Prophetic Claims

The donkey and the colt and the Mount of Olives are each rich with both messianic and eschatological overtones. The Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, brings to mind Ezekiel 11:23, “And the glory of the Lord ascended from the middle of the city and stopped on the mountain east of the city.”

The donkey and colt, from Zechariah 9:9:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
    Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you;
    triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

JANT suggests this also connects to Isaiah 62:11:

The Lord has proclaimed
    to the end of the earth:
Say to daughter Zion,
    “Look, your savior comes;
his reward is with him
    and his recompense before him.”

Conclusion: On the Shared (?) Tradition

The view that the Hebrew Bible was prophesying forward to Jesus, and that having come to fulfill that prophecy, Jesus then instituted a new covenant to replace the old is called supersessionism. It’s Christian antisemitism. And it’s a view that is widely held within many Christian communities. The triumphal entry asks us to confront that view. Had I presented the texts here in the opposite order, with a shift in rhetorical perspective, we could easily have motivated an argument like that offered by supersessionism. That, of course, is the wrong view.

The Jewish canon is formed within the somewhat recent history for the first century. Some scholars place the final form of the Hebrew canon as recently as 140-50 BCE. That dating would place a final form only 50-100 years before Jesus. For analogy, this would be like us looking at documents from turn of the 20th century, viewed from our perspective today. For me this raises an interesting question about Christian tradition.

Today, Christianity has developed a tradition that is 2,000 years old, but the texts included here, those drawn from the Hebrew tradition by the gospel authors, were not christian, as it relates to our understanding. They are jewish. Some look to Paul, writing in the 50s CE, as the “first Christian,” but I’m not convinced. Paul was certainly recruiting pagans and bringing them into a community of christ followers, but Paul’s commitment to the immediacy of the end time left his pagan christ followers in a sort of lacuna of affiliation. No defined christian community, replete with shared belief, existed, but neither were Paul’s pagan christ followers converting to judaism.

Though Paul formed assemblies—ekklesia—it would be a stretch to call this a church. The split would come soon enough, but Paul, by my reading, didn’t see himself as starting a new religion to develop its own cultic practices. Paul loves to emphasize that he was the “last apostle” and one with a first-hand experience of Jesus, in a vision, and so he did seem himself as one commissioned by Jesus the christos, and he did engage in theological and rhetorical discourse, but I’m just not sure we can assert an independent christianity at this stage. And so, where does this leave us with respect to the gospels and christian tradition?

I do know this: The triumphal entry is jewish writing about a jewish leader whose followers, many writing in retrospect, deemed him anointed by God for a special commision. These gospel authors made use of their traditions to make claims about Jesus, the anointed one. Whether what christians celebrate on Palm Sunday is the start of their movement, or the waning days of second Temple period judaism, before post-Pharisaic, Rabbinic judaism takes off, I wouldn’t feign to conclude one way or the other, but I do know that these stories are authentically jewish.