Matthew 15:21, for a Jewish rabbi in the first century, traveling there voluntarily was not just unusual, it was almost unthinkable, the history between Israel and the Phoenician coast went back centuries and almost none of it was good. The prophets Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel, all of them had delivered judgments against Tyre and Sidon. In the Hebrew Scriptures, these cities represented pagan culture at it’s most entrenched, they were the source of the Baal worship that had nearly destroyed Israel during the reign of Ahab. Queen Jezebel, perhaps the most villainous figure in the entire Old Testament, was a Phoenician princess from Sidon.
This is where Jesus goes immediately after a heated argument about who is clean and who is unclean, the deliberateness of that cannot be overstated. Mark 7:24 adds a detail that Matthew omits, Jesus entered a house there and did not want anyone to know he was there. Jesus was exhausted, the ministry had been relentless, he was trying to rest, he was trying to disappear, but there is a word that comes next in Mark’s account that changes everything, it says, he could not escape notice. Jesus could not stay hidden, because word travels fast, even across the ethnic and cultural boundaries of the first century, even into Gentile territory.
The story of this teacher from Galilee, who healed the sick and drove out demons, had already spread far beyond the borders of Israel and someone had been waiting, Matthew 15:22 calls her a Canaanite woman. Matthew is making a deliberate and provocative choice with that word. By the first century, the Canaanites as a people had not existed for hundreds of years, they had been absorbed into the the surrounding cultures long before Jesus was born, nobody in the Roman world called themselves Canaanite, that label had disappeared from everyday usage.
So, Why does Matthew use it? Because he is writing for a Jewish Christian audience that would have felt the weight of that word immediately. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Canaanites are the enemy, they are the people Israel was supposed to have driven out of the land, they are the source of idol worship, child sacrifice and everything that stood in opposition to the God of Israel, calling this woman a Canaanite, was like Matthew pulling out the most extreme possible label for an outsider and applying it to her. Matthew wants his readers to feel every layer of this woman’s foreignness, he wants them to understand that, by every possible measure, she has no standing to approach Jesus, no history, no covenant, no claim.
This is where Jesus goes immediately after a heated argument about who is clean and who is unclean, the deliberateness of that cannot be overstated. Mark 7:24 adds a detail that Matthew omits, Jesus entered a house there and did not want anyone to know he was there. Jesus was exhausted, the ministry had been relentless, he was trying to rest, he was trying to disappear, but there is a word that comes next in Mark’s account that changes everything, it says, he could not escape notice. Jesus could not stay hidden, because word travels fast, even across the ethnic and cultural boundaries of the first century, even into Gentile territory.
The story of this teacher from Galilee, who healed the sick and drove out demons, had already spread far beyond the borders of Israel and someone had been waiting, Matthew 15:22 calls her a Canaanite woman. Matthew is making a deliberate and provocative choice with that word. By the first century, the Canaanites as a people had not existed for hundreds of years, they had been absorbed into the the surrounding cultures long before Jesus was born, nobody in the Roman world called themselves Canaanite, that label had disappeared from everyday usage.
So, Why does Matthew use it? Because he is writing for a Jewish Christian audience that would have felt the weight of that word immediately. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Canaanites are the enemy, they are the people Israel was supposed to have driven out of the land, they are the source of idol worship, child sacrifice and everything that stood in opposition to the God of Israel, calling this woman a Canaanite, was like Matthew pulling out the most extreme possible label for an outsider and applying it to her. Matthew wants his readers to feel every layer of this woman’s foreignness, he wants them to understand that, by every possible measure, she has no standing to approach Jesus, no history, no covenant, no claim.
