Parable

History

Parables appear in the New Testament Gospels, where Jesus told stories like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Some scholars trace these to mashalim, Hebrew comparisons from the Talmudic period. The Old Testament also contains mashalim, such as Nathan’s ewe-lamb story. In Islam, Sufi tradition uses parables to teach values, popularized beyond those circles by Idries Shah and Anthony de Mello. A modern example from the mid-1800s, the parable of the broken window, challenges certain economic ideas.

Characteristics

A parable is a short, simple story that reveals a universal truth. It sets a scene, shows an action, and then presents the outcome. This type of tale often features a character who either faces a moral choice or makes a poor decision, suffering the unforeseen results.

While the story’s lesson is rarely spelled out, it is meant to be clear and easy to grasp, not hidden. The key feature of a parable is its underlying message about how to behave or what to believe. It uses metaphorical language to make difficult or complex ideas easier to discuss, turning an abstract argument into a concrete, understandable narrative. A parable differs from an allegory, which is a broader narrative form.

An allegory also uses metaphor but can have multiple, noncontradictory interpretations and may carry ambiguous or hard-to-parse implications. As H.W. Fowler observed, both parable and allegory aim to enlighten the listener by presenting a case where they have no direct stake, thus inviting a fair judgment. The parable is more compact than the allegory, resting on a single principle and a single moral, and it is designed so the listener sees that this moral applies just as well to their own life.

Parables of Jesus

Medieval interpreters often treated Jesus' parables as allegories with symbolic correspondences for every element, but modern scholars beginning with Adolf Jülicher regard those interpretations as incorrect. Jülicher viewed some parables as similitudes with three parts: a picture part, a reality part, and a tertium comparationis, holding that each parable makes a single important point. Gnostics suggested Jesus kept some teachings secret within his circle of disciples, deliberately obscuring meaning by using parables, as in Mark 4:11–12. The Epistle of Barnabas, dated between AD 70 to 132, supports the idea that coded meanings become apparent only with additional information or initiation.

Another component is the participatory and spontaneous quality of Jesus' parables, often created in response to a question or argument. To educated Greco-Roman audiences, this use was reminiscent of the Socratic method, with Gospel authorship depicting various groups questioning Jesus similarly to interlocutors in Plato's dialogues. The rhetorical style of Roman Senator and lawyer Cicero was also known for using a seemingly unrelated anecdote that demonstrates insight pertaining to the current topic.

Other figures of speech

The parable is related to figures of speech such as metaphor and simile. It uses concrete, perceptible phenomena to illustrate abstract ideas, and may be said to be a metaphor extended to form a brief, coherent narrative. A parable also resembles a simile, a metaphorical construction in which something is said to be 'like' something else, but unlike a simile, a parable's meaning is implicit, although not secret.

Did You Know?

• The word parable comes from the Greek παραβολή (parabolē), literally 'throwing' (bolē) 'alongside' (para-), by extension meaning 'comparison, illustration, analogy.'
• The Quran's Q39:28-30 boasts 'every kind of parable in the Quran,' including parables of the good and evil tree, of the two men, and of the spider's house.
• Q16:77 contains the parable of the slave and his master, followed by the parable of the blind man and the sighted.