07_Biblica_AN_Kim_Layout 1 16/12/13 12:29 Pagina 590 590 DAVID W. KIM for her family. The phrase of ecouyou (“still some distance from home”) shows that the unknown woman had obviously been far away from her house and now she is on her way home (with food) because the meal time was getting close. While she was walking, the handle of the jar was broken and the meal she was carrying was emptied out from the food jar onto the road. This scene of the parable could imply that the woman was probably carrying a kind of either “solid food” (like flour, grain, barley, wheat, rice, potato, or maize) or “liquid” (like milk, oil, water, or honey). The woman herself did not face any external trouble on the way 23, but the theme of the parable is about “futile efforts or the nihilism of life”: _ntarecpwh ehoun epecyei … ache erof (pG_lmeei) ef` soueit (“When she reached her house, she … found it (the jar) empty”). The synoptic tradition does not include this kind of parable. Neither do any gnostic texts recount a similar parable. Then, where can one find the origin of “the woman and jar parable”? Is there any clue to its identity? 24 Montefiore, even though he generally saw Thomas through gnostic eyes, excluded Logion 97 from the traditional gnostic concept, suggesting the possibility that the parable of the woman’s imperceptible loss of noeit (“meal”) has not changed much in transmission. For the reader, the parable was seen as “an authentic parable”: “it is very difficult to imagine the gnostics having made up a parable the subject of which was a woman” 25. The story of the Zarephath widow in 1 Kgs 17,8-16 supports the pre-gnostic approach. This well-known Jewish story matches that of the Thomasine woman with the jar. In this fable, when the land of Gilead was going through a period of famine, Elijah went to the Kerith Ravine (east of the Jordan) and then to Zarephath. The prophet of God met a poor widow with a child and asked her for a piece of bread. The Zarephath widow confessed that she had “only a handful of meal in a jar and a little oil in a cruise” (v. 12). Elijah required her to bake for him and promised that “the jar of meal (flour) should not be spent … until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth” (v. 14). 23 neccooun an pe ne_mpeceime ehice (“she did not realise it; she had noticed no accident”). 24 Lindemann suspects that the meal container was completely empty when the handle broke. For the reader, “the total unawareness of the woman” is a difficult picture. How could the woman not feel or sense any sound? Lindemann then draws on a gnostic concept that Logion 97 is artificial “in which one finds oneself losing ‘the knowledge (gnosis) of the moment’ completely”. A. LINDEMANN, “Zur Gleichnisinterpretation im Thomas- Evangelion”, ZNW 71 (1980) 222, 226. Also see, STROKER, “Extra canonical Parables”, 100-101. 25 MONTEFIORE, “A Comparison of the Parables”, 242-243. See also, R. DORAN, “A Complex of Parables: GTh 96-98”, NovT 29 (1987) 347-352.