Bible Synapse
Was the woman who begged Jesus to heal her daughter a Canaanite or a Greek?
Hard question · The life of Jesus · raised by 2 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
In the region of Tyre and Sidon “a woman of Canaan” cries to Jesus for her daughter.
Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.
Mark says “the woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation”.
For a certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell at his feet: The woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation; and she besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter.
“Canaan begat Sidon his firstborn”: the Phoenician coast was Canaanite land.
And Canaan begat Sidon his firstborn, and Heth,
The objection
Matthew calls the woman “a woman of Canaan”. Mark says she was “a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation”. A Canaanite and a Greek seem to be two different peoples.
The answer
The two Gospels describe the same woman from different angles. ‘Greek’ (Hellēnis) in the New Testament often means simply a non-Jew, a Gentile, as when Paul speaks of the gospel going “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16). She was a Gentile, at home in the Greek-speaking culture of the coast. Mark then gives her nationality: a Syrophoenician, that is, a Phoenician of the Roman province of Syria, probably to distinguish her from the Phoenicians of North Africa.
Matthew uses the old biblical name. Tyre and Sidon lay in the land of the Canaanites: Sidon was the “firstborn” of Canaan (Genesis 10:15), and the Phoenicians were the descendants of the Canaanites who had kept the coast (Judges 1:31–32). For Jewish readers ‘a woman of Canaan’ said at once that she came from Israel’s old enemies, which makes her faith, and Jesus’ answer to it, all the more striking. A woman can be Canaanite by descent, Phoenician by nation and Greek in language and religion all at once.
From the classic commentators
though the land of Israel in general, was called the land of Canaan, yet there was a particular part, which was at first inhabited by Canaan himself, which bore this name; and is the same with Phoenicia, of which this woman was an inhabitantJohn Gill, Exposition of the Bible, on Mark 7:26 (1746–1763)
Matthew (Mt 15:22) calls her ‘a woman of Canaan’—a more intelligible description to his Jewish readers (compare Jud 1:30, 32, 33).Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary, on Mark 7:26 (1871)
Sources
- John Gill, Exposition of the Bible: Mark 7 (1746–1763), at Bible Hub
- Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary: Mark 7 (1871), at Bible Hub