The Jericho road and the pilgrim economy

Mark places Bartimaeus on a specific road at a specific moment in the year. The geography and the economy of that moment carry weight that an English reader can miss easily. This sidebar names what was happening on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem in the first century, and why Bartimaeus's cloak is more than a coat.

The road itself

Jericho sits at the foot of the Judean wilderness, about fifteen miles north-east of Jerusalem and about a thousand metres lower. The road from Jericho to Jerusalem is a steep climb through dry, broken country. In the first century, it was one of the main pilgrim routes into the holy city, used by Jews from Galilee and the diaspora travelling to Jerusalem for Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. Pilgrims preferred this route over the more direct road through Samaria because Samaritans and Jews did not always get on, and the wilderness route, while harder, avoided the friction.

Pilgrims travelled in groups for safety. The road was notoriously dangerous; it is the setting Jesus uses in Luke's parable of the Good Samaritan, where a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho is robbed and beaten. The danger was real, and pilgrims carrying festival offerings or merchant wealth were tempting targets.

The Passover season in particular brought crowds. Estimates of pilgrim numbers at first-century Passover vary widely, but the order of magnitude is striking — by some estimates Jerusalem's population swelled by a factor of three or more during the festival. The pilgrim economy was the city's economy at that time of year.

Why Bartimaeus is at the gate

Beggars in the first-century Mediterranean world placed themselves at gates and gathering places where almsgiving was a religious obligation. The Hebrew Bible commands care for the poor; the Torah teaches that the alien, the widow, the orphan, and the poor man have a claim on the produce of the field (Leviticus 19v9–10, Deuteronomy 24v19–22). For a pilgrim travelling to the temple to give thanks for a harvest or to bring a Passover offering, giving alms to a beggar at the city gate was part of the pious practice of the journey.

Bartimaeus is therefore not randomly placed. He is on a pilgrim route, at the city gate of Jericho, in what was likely the run-up to Passover. The pilgrim traffic that week would have been high. Almsgiving would have been a religious expectation. A blind beggar at the Jericho gate at that moment would have made a decent day's takings.

The pericope's reference to "Jesus and his disciples and a great multitude" (Mark 10v46) fits exactly: a pilgrim crowd moving up to Jerusalem for the festival, with Jesus and his followers travelling among them.

What the cloak meant

The himation — the outer garment that Bartimaeus throws off when Jesus calls — had a triple use for a beggar. By day it was clothing. By night it was bedding. Spread on the ground in front of the beggar, it was the receiving-cloth on which alms were thrown by passers-by. It was, in other words, the apparatus of the beggar's economic existence.

The Hebrew Bible takes the cloak seriously enough to legislate about it. A creditor who takes a poor man's cloak in pledge must return it before sunset, because it is his only covering; it is the cloak for his skin; in what else can he sleep? (Exodus 22v26–27). The same instruction appears in Deuteronomy 24v12–13. The cloak is the last thing a poor man owns; the law protects it from being stripped away.

For Bartimaeus to throw off his cloak when Jesus calls is therefore not the casual gesture an English reader might assume. It is throwing off the apparatus of his economic existence, leaving the day's takings on the ground, and standing up to come with empty hands. He has nothing left to come back to. Mark is showing the reader what discipleship costs.

The counterpoint Mark is setting up

The cloak passage in Mark 10v50 sits twenty-five verses after the rich man passage in Mark 10v17–22. The rich man comes to Jesus, asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, is told to sell what he has and give to the poor and follow, and walks away grieving because he had many possessions.

Bartimaeus is the deliberate counterpoint. He is told nothing about his possessions; he is asked only what he wants Jesus to do for him. And he throws off the one thing he has — the cloak — and comes anyway, without being asked.

The rich man could not do what he was told to do. Bartimaeus does, without prompting, what the rich man could not bring himself to. Mark places the two pericopes inside the same chapter so the reader makes the connection. The journey-section's argument about discipleship lands here: the poor blind man at the Jericho gate is the model the rich man was unable to be.

A practical note for the facilitator