The Parable of the Oil in the Lamps - without the misogyny

The Parable of the Oil in the Lamps invites us to be alert and ready, with our lamps charged with oil, all through the night, ready for the return of the day.

It is the source for the folk‑song, Give me Oil in my Lamp. ‘Keep me burning till the break of day.’

It sits in the middle of Matthew 24‑25, full of dark warnings of destruction and judgement, which will come when least expected. We are not to be deceived by the false securities of great stone temples or present comforts, for the signs of the times are already here.

The setting for the parable is a wedding celebration, that will have taken place over a number of days. We do not know the function of the ceremony described, or its place in the sequence of events. No other source describes any similar ceremony or ritual. But for whatever reason, just as people assume traditional roles in a modern wedding celebration - from hen or stag to various roles on the day - at some point in this celebration, all the unmarried young women wait through the night, with lamps, for the groom.

In an ideal world, a wedding is an occasion for both solemnity and joy; but part of the contemporary reality is that for every wedding they have experienced in solemnity and joy, most people have seen forty weddings mocked in comedy, or scandalised in drama. This changes the context in which the parable is heard. Sadly it introduces the high risk of ridicule for the characters in the parable. The practice of gender segregation around weddings further exacerbates that risk. Presenting this parable, in contemporary English, in the context of a wedding, in a way that avoids the risk of either ridicule or misogyny, requires great care.

All forty‑two English‑language translations of this text at BibleHub describe those who are unprepared, with insufficient oil in their lamps, as ‘foolish’. This would be an unhelpful word in any case, with its nuances, in English, of slapstick, clowning and comedy. The choices made in the previous verse, to describe the lead characters in the parable, leave two translations speaking of foolish young women, and five - including NRSV - speaking of foolish bridesmaids. These combinations of word‑choices and context have failed to avoid the risk of ridicule and misogynistic stereotyping. They do a disservice to the text, obscuring the parable itself and replacing it with something unworthy and inappropriate. The remaining thirty‑five translations use the archaic Latinate word ‘virgin’, which in contemporary English fails to define their age, gender, or marital status, and instead describes their sexual history, an act of misogyny at its most raw; to call this a distraction from the parable is to understate the case.

It is worth considering whether the parable might be presented without the background context of the wedding at all. In the previous example of Matthew 15:26‑27, the elements of children, table, food, crumbs, and humiliation were together deemed to establish a sufficient translation of the metaphor, and preferable to a translation that added the distraction of a direct translation of kynarioi, which would introduce into the English text nuances not present in the original Greek. In the same way, this parable could be presented to include the central elements of oil, lamps, light, and preparedness, but without the distraction of the wedding.

The wedding, and the bridegroom, however, are important metaphors for the kingdom and the end times elsewhere in scripture. Even though the context of the wedding is not directly applicable to the individual parable, it is relevant to the wider theme of these chapters.

The parable does still function, however, without reference to the gender of the specific group selected for this traditional role of waiting through the night for the groom. The solution in SSRA for this text, therefore, as for so many other parables, is to render the text with the gender of the main characters not specified.

After all this consideration, one thing has been missed. It has been so important to rescue this parable from centuries of misogyny that the first priority for any preacher is surely to preach on oil, lamps, light, and preparedness. But what has been missed is female independence, dignity, and agency. Avoiding the distraction of any reference to the traditional misogynistic translations, a preacher may wish to observe that in the original Greek, the lamp‑bearers are all women, and the extra point is being made that women have independence and agency, just as much as men, in the question of working and preparing for the coming of the kingdom.

Michael Hampson
May 2026