Yeshua and his disciples spent that night back in Bethany, and returned into Jerusalem the next morning. It was on this day Yeshua finally got down to specifics about the harms he blames the Pharisees for causing; and he included the Sadducees and the chief priests in his bill of particulars. He began fairly gently:

This completes the catalogue of criticism levelled by Yeshua against the scribes and Pharisees. Now, it is clear that he has spent his year or so of traveling and teaching breaking the laws of the haberim, despising or ignoring their punctilious observances. What is not so clear, after all, is what was immoral or evil about those observances. He has put xhem down, saying that you did not need to do them at all; but that does not make them evil, it only makes them unnecessary.

We need to remember that the Pharisees were in many ways a saving force in the history of the Jews. By their insistence on the observance of the historical traditions they prevented the assimilation of the Jews into the Hellenistic and Roman culture, whereas the deported citizens of Israel had been assimilated into Assyrian society and disappeared. But for the Judeans who were defeated and deported by the Babylonians the story was different; they have survived as a people, but the Babylonians have disappeared completely. And the best among the Pharisees taught and practiced ethical and moral teachings many of which resemble those which Yeshua promulgated: Rabbi Hillel, as we have told, and Shammai too, and others. We should expect this, of course, since they were both reading the same Hebrew scriptures.

But the practice of their own teachings had always been held back by the "chosen people" notion, which was a narrow nationalism and sense of superiority to the peoples around them. Ezra, the scribe who returned from Babylon in about the fourth century B.C.E., insisted on everyone who was married to a non-Jew getting divorced from them and expelling them from the Jewish society. The book of Ruth, which taught that David's own grandmother had been a foreigner, a Moabitess, and a wicked foreigner according to the Jewish notions at that, and the book of Jonah, which taught that God could forgive even the most wicked of men, symbolized by the Assyrians who destroyed Israel, were written about this time or later, to protest such narrow exclusiveness. And by the time of Yeshua this narrowness had degenerated into primarily a practice of being rigidly different for the sake of being different; and it appears where Yeshua most rejected the teachings of his fellow-Jews was in his attitude towards non-Jews. He preaches to and heals all alike: a Roman, a Phoenician, a Samaritan; and he pictures a non-Jew, the Samaritan, as the world's most unforgettable example of compassion and caring. We can even conclude that it was not his breaking of the rules of the scribes and Pharisees that set them so much against him as it was his acceptance of and caring for non-Jews.

While they were still inside the temple courtyard, he went over to the contribution jars which were embedded in the wall to see how much money visitors were putting in. As he stood there, he watched many well-to-do persons tossing in many coins and valuable gifts. Then there came a poor widow, who put in a tiny coin, called by Mark "two mites, which make a farthing." It must have been almost the smallest possible coin in Hebrewdom. But Yeshua called his disciples over, and said: