Sayings of Jesus: “It is not right to give the children’s bread to the dogs”

This phrase features in the parallel accounts of a story in Matthew 15 and Mark 7. In short, a Gentile woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter; this is his negative-sounding response. Clearly, ‘the children’s bread’ here refers to healing, and ‘the dogs’ refers to Gentiles—in this case, a child.

We’re surely not wrong to be shocked at this point: It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing Jesus would say. Does the fact that he ultimately heals the child redeem things?

Understanding the saying requires reading it within its cultural context more than is true of some other Gospel stories.

By way of background, Jesus and his disciples have travelled from the Galilee region in northern Israel to the Phoenician region of Tyre and Sidon, Mediterranean coastal cities in the Roman province of Syria in modern-day Lebanon. This is the first key feature: it was a Gentile region.

Building on that, Matthew describes her as a ‘Canaanite’ woman ‘from that vicinity’. Immediately this seems curious, insofar as the region had not been called ‘Canaan’ for many centuries, but Matthew is making a theological point, not a geographical point. The Canaanites were not simply Gentiles but Israel’s archetypal enemies in the Old Testament.

Matthew—writing for a substantially Jewish/Jewish–Christian audience—is therefore invoking a theological gloss in the way he sets the scene. Such details are rarely unimportant when it comes to what we are supposed to see as significant in a story.  

Matthew’s point is that the woman is the archetypal ‘outsider’, excluded from the people of God—again offering an insight into what’s about to happen.

In contrast, Mark—writing for a contemporary Graeco-Roman audience, for whom ‘Canaanite’ would have meant very little—simply describes the woman as a ‘Syrophoenician’—a matter-of-fact description for a Gentile from that region.

Throughout the story, we see Matthew framing the story in these Jewish ways, far more than comes out in Mark’s rendition.     

Only in Matthew does the woman frame her request as “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Despite being a Gentile, she identifies Jesus with the Jewish Messiah (Son of David being an expected messianic title), and hence, the God of Israel’s anointed one. Again, this is significant for Matthew’s purposes; Mark does not include that detail.    

Jesus’ initial response to the woman’s request is our title phrase: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs” (preceded in Mark by, “First let the children eat all they want”).

What have children got to do with it? Once again, the detail is not insignificant.

The children are God’s children: the Jewish people (see, for example, how the word is used in Matthew 17:25–26). The analogy of ‘the children’s bread’—and the express addition of the word ‘first’ in Mark’s account—refers to Jesus as Messiah having come first to the Jewish people, before the later extension of the messianic invitation to the Gentiles (see e.g., Matthew 10:5–6 “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.”). Matthew makes it explicit in this story through Jesus adding: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”   

The woman then responds to Jesus by picking up on, and then creatively reworking, his own analogy. Yes, she says, I agree that it wouldn’t be right for the children’s bread (God’s messianic invitation) to be given first to the dogs (the Gentiles) rather than the children. But that doesn’t mean the dogs are excluded. Using your own analogy, Jesus, we all know the dogs are allowed to eat the scraps that fall from the children’s table. (Perhaps she has in mind that small children, in particular, tend not to be the most dextrous eaters!).

In other words, she doesn’t reject Jesus’ metaphor—she finds space for herself and her daughter’s need within it, without challenging the priority of his mission to Israel.

I think we’re supposed to smile at this point (as I imagine Jesus did): “Great answer!”

Jesus was not, I think, indicating an unwillingness to heal her daughter, nor, more widely, an unwillingness to bless Gentiles; rather, he wanted to tease out an affirming, trusting personal response—the woman’s articulation of who Jesus was and his mission. This is reflected in how both Matthew and Mark present the story—more explicitly so in Matthew.

This story—extending healing to a Gentile, in response to her recognition of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah—is a precursor to the full inclusion of the Gentiles in the people of God, which was soon to come (see Jesus’ ‘Great Commission’ to take the good news to all nations in Matthew 28:19, which the book of Acts then continues).            

But what about this phrase, ‘the dogs’? Surely that could hardly be more derogatory—and coming from Jesus’ lips no less.

Some commentaries will simply say that ‘dogs’ was a derogatory term used by Jews when speaking of Gentiles; but this is inappropriately simplistic (and inappropriately anti-Jewish—as indeed is so much commentary within the Reformed evangelical tradition, reflecting its embedded theological anti-Judaism). The use of ‘dog’ as an insult was by no means exclusive to Jews vis-à-vis Gentiles; it was also found among Greeks and Romans, and even Jews speaking of other Jews (e.g., Isaiah 56:10­-11).

I think there are good reasons to hear Jesus’ use of ‘dogs’ in inverted commas—namely, in a “You have heard it said” sense. Rather than Jesus making the statement as his personal opinion, he’s inviting her to push back against a customary saying (which she does extremely cleverly).

It’s also important to be aware that rather than dogs being seen primarily as cherished family pets (as dog lovers reading it today might assume), they were generally viewed in that culture as wild scavengers: hunting in packs, eating from garbage dumps, animal carcasses, and so on. In the Old Testament, dogs carry strongly negative associations.

In the context of this particular story, however, I think it’s likely that we are intended to think of them as family pets, sitting under the children’s meal table waiting for scraps to drop. Rather than the ordinary Greek word for dogs (kyon), Jesus uses a milder Greek word, which carries the sense of ‘little dogs’ or ‘puppies’ (kynaria). In choosing that word, Jesus modifies and diminishes the impact of a common insult, and perhaps also offers the woman a hint for how she might reframe what he has just said in a positive way (as indeed she does). Some commentators will question an intended distinction between the Greek words here; but at a minimum, we still have the woman’s reframing of Jesus’ statement within a plausible domestic scenario in which the dogs are close enough to the family table to be allowed to eat what falls from it.      

So, drawing Matthew and Mark together—and paraphrasing the exchange—I hear it saying something like this:

Jesus: “The children need to be fed first. Surely you wouldn’t expect me to take their food and give it to the dogs.”

The woman: “Of course not—but surely the dogs don’t have to wait ‘til they’re done. They can have the scraps that fall from the table even now!”